Carbon

Logo on Carbon's GitHub organization
Family	C
Designed by	Google
Typing discipline	Static, nominative, partly inferred
Implementation language	C++
License	Apache-2.0-with-LLVM-Exception
Filename extensions	.carbon
Website	github.com/carbon-language
Influenced by
C++, Rust, Go

Carbon, or Carbon-Lang, is an experimental, general-purpose programming language. The project is open-source and was started by Google, following in the footsteps of previous Google-made programming languages (Go and Dart). Google engineer Chandler Carruth first introduced Carbon at the CppNorth conference in Toronto in July 2022. He stated that Carbon was created to be a C++ successor.^[1][2][3] The language is expected to have a 1.0 release in 2024 or 2025.^[4]

The language intends to fix several perceived shortcomings of C++^[5] but otherwise provides a similar feature set. The main goals of the language are readability and "bi-directional interoperability" (which allows the user to include C++ code in the Carbon file), as opposed to using a new language like Rust, that, while being influenced by C++, is not two-way compatible with C++ programs. Changes to the language will be decided by the Carbon leads.^[6][7][8][9]

Carbon's documents, design, implementation, and related tools are hosted on GitHub under the Apache-2.0 license with LLVM Exceptions.^[10]

Example

The following shows how a "Hello, World!" program is written in Carbon:

package Sample api;

fn Main() -> i32 {
    var s: auto = "Hello, World!";
    Print(s);
    return 0;
}

The following is the equivalent "Hello, World!" program written in C++:

#include <iostream>

int main() {
    auto s = "Hello, World!";
    std::cout << s;
    return 0;
}