alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust
A few weeks ago I saw a post about someone converting an entire C++ codebase to Rust using AI in under two weeks.
That inspired me — if AI can rewrite a whole language stack that fast, I wanted to try building a programming language from scratch with AI assistance.
I've also been noticing growing global interest in Korean language and culture, and I wondered: what would a programming language look like if every keyword was in Hangul (the Korean writing system)?
Han is the result. It's a statically-typed language written in Rust with a full compiler pipeline (lexer → parser → AST → interpreter + LLVM IR codegen).
It supports arrays, structs with impl blocks, closures, pattern matching, try/catch, file I/O, module imports, a REPL, and a basic LSP server.
This is a side project, not a "you should use this instead of Python" pitch. Feedback on language design, compiler architecture, or the Korean keyword choices is very welcome.
Comments
I love this. Nice work!
It’s fun to look at your code samples, have absolutely no clue what any of it means, and think about just how many non-English-speaking programmers must have felt that way looking at our all-English programming languages.
Except lisp: that’s just inscrutable symbols like cond and cons and car and cadr and a bunch of parens! :-)
Wonderful! What a cool idea. For anyone interested, you can learn the whole of Hangul in an afternoon; it's cleverly designed to be very logical and has some handy mnemonics: https://korean.stackexchange.com/a/213
A simple translation of keywords seems straightforward, I wonder why it's not standard.
# def two_sum(arr: list[int], target: int) -> list[int]:
펀크 투섬(아래이: 목록[정수], 타개트: 정수) -> 목록[정수]:
# n = len(arr)
ㄴ = 길이(아래이)
# start, end = 0, n - 1
시작, 끝 = 0, ㄴ - 1
# while start < end:
동안 시작 < 끝:
I hear that information processing speed is nearly the same across all languages though regardless of density, so in terms of processing speed, may not make much difference.
fun fact, you can easily write c in any language you want through the power of macros
https://github.com/farant/rhubarb/blob/main/include/latina.h
edit: oh, maybe you can’t do full unicode. that’s too bad!
Really cool to see more developer tools built in Rust. I've been using Rust for a desktop app backend (Tauri v2) and the performance difference vs Electron is night and day — native memory usage, instant startup. Curious what the compile times look like for Han compared to rustc itself.
I don't know Korean at all, but this looks cool and a fun project. I'm curious if this reduces typing or has any benefits being in Hangul vs Latin?
i only code in this when no ones around. one might say I...han solo
My dream is to one day make a chaldean programming language for my kids. Stuff like this is inspiring
I’ve always wondered why there weren’t more non-english charactered programming languages but I can only assume it was just inertia
This seems like a reasonably good security measure too
I’ve always wondered why there weren’t more non-english charactered programming languages but I can only assume it was just inertia
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When I was studying Computer Science in college, I once remarked how lucky we, English speakers, are that programming languages use English nouns and verbs. A ton of my classmates were here on a student visa, and English was not their first language. I always thought that programming in English put me at an advantage on the learning curve. I also always thought it was silly when someone would quip that programming should count for “foreign language” credit. Anyway, always cool to see non-English programming languages.