I'm Building a Programming Language From Scratch. Here's What That's Actually Like.

I'm Building a Programming Language From Scratch. Here's What That's Actually Like. 745 commits. 360,000 lines of Rust. 17 compiler crates. One person. I started writing Ori on January 20th, 2026. Five weeks later, I have a working lexer, parser, type checker with full Hindley-Milner inference, a tree-walking interpreter, a Salsa-based incremental compilation pipeline, and an LLVM backend that can compile native binaries. I've written 241 spec conformance tests in the language itself. The language has iterators, pattern matching, algebraic data types, derived traits, for-yield comprehensions, and an ARC-based memory model. And honestly? Most days it still feels like I'm building the foundation. This is the story of where Ori is, why it exists, and what building a language from scratch actually looks like when you're not a PL researcher at a university. You're just a developer who got frustrated enough to do something about it. Why Another Language? I'll be direct: I think we're designi