Carbon (programming language)


Carbon is an experimental programming language designed for interoperability with C++. The project is open-source and was started at Google. Google's 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. The language is expected to have an experimental MVP version 0.1 in late 2026 at the earliest and a production-ready version 1.0 after 2028.
The language intends to fix several perceived shortcomings of C++ but otherwise provides a similar feature set.
The main goals of the language are readability and "bi-directional interoperability", as opposed to using a new language like Rust, that, whilst being influenced by C++, is not two-way compatible with C++ programs. Changes to the language will be decided by the Carbon leads. It aims to build on top of the C++ ecosystem the way in an analogous role to TypeScript to JavaScript, or Kotlin to Java.
Carbon's documents, design, implementation, and related tools are hosted on GitHub under the Apache-2.0 license with LLVM Exceptions.

Example

The following shows how a program might be written in Carbon and C++:
CarbonC++

package Geometry;
import Math;
class Circle
fn PrintTotalArea
fn Main -> i32

import std;
using std::span;
using std::vector;
struct Circle ;
void PrintTotalArea
int main