Awsum

Correctness-first, cross-target functional language.

Correctness-first: No numeric overflow, underflow, or precision loss. No NaN, null, nil, or undefined. No throw, no catch, no panic — errors are values. No stack overflow on tail, non-tail, or even mutual recursion. This trade-off is deliberate: correctness comes ahead of runtime performance, compile speed, and syntactic convenience.

Cross-target: The same source compiles to JVM, CLR, JavaScript, WebAssembly, or LLVM, and produces the same result on every one — independent of each target's quirks and built-in types. The compiler accepts only the effects supported by the chosen target and program type.

Why Awsum?

The problem: languages implement the wrong choices — people die, billions burn

28 dead, ~100 wounded — Patriot battery, Dhahran 1991: fixed-point precision drift on a continuously-running clock missed an incoming Scud.
≥3 dead, 3+ severely injured — Therac-25, 1985–87: a 1-byte counter overflowed and disabled the safety interlock.
All four generators offline mid-flight — Boeing 787, 2015 (FAA AD 2015-09-07): an int32 counter ticking every 10 ms overflows at 248 days and drops every GCU into failsafe. Caught in the lab; FAA mandated power-cycles every 120 days until a patch shipped.
$370–500 million + 4 satellites — Ariane 5, Flight 501, 1996: int16 overflow on a 64-bit-to-16-bit conversion.
184 billion BTC almost minted — Bitcoin Value Overflow Incident, 2010 (CVE-2010-5139): integer overflow let one transaction credit two outputs of ~92 billion BTC each, breaking the 21M supply cap. The network forked, the blockchain was rolled back 53 blocks.
$2.41 trillion / year, US alone — CISQ 2022 estimate of poor software quality, with null pointer dereference, integer overflow, division by zero, and buffer overflow named as load-bearing categories.

Details: Catastrophes Caused by Programming Language Defects.

How these problems are solved in other languages

Short answer: almost nobody is going to solve them (proofs coming soon).

How Awsum solves it

No null reference as a valid value — Maybe with exhaustiveness enforced by the compiler.
Honest integer arithmetic via Either — overflow, underflow, precision loss, and division by zero are typed errors, handled exhaustively at the call site.
Stack-safe recursion of any shape — self, mutual, or non-tail compiles to a bounded loop on every backend, including JVM and JS where the host has no native cross-method tail calls.
Platform effects gated at compile time — a browser-only effect in a CLI program (or vice versa) is a compile error, not a runtime surprise.

Backed by

Awsum is open source, run on personal time and paid for out of pocket. Sponsorship turns it into something durable — faster releases, faster issue turnaround, lower risk of stalling.

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