For the last 5-6 years there hasn’t been much work on Carp, neither by me, nor the community. The whole project did feel quite dormant and possibly “done” (which in the software world often equals dead). You could use the language for stuff, but no one really did.

All of that changed during the first half of 2026 when Veit Heller started contributing major features to the project again, big time. Veit has been a core maintainer of the project for a long time, and has also helped Carp reach a bigger audience through his blog and by giving talks at conferences about it.

In addition to the language improvements, he also wrote a bunch of useful libraries (all collected in the Carpentry Github organization). Using the libraries made him find even more bugs in the language that then got fixed, improving the state of the compiler vastly.

All of this culminated in Veit deciding to rewrite the Carp compiler in Carp itself, eventually creating Metacarp! This new compiler passes the original test suite of the regular compiler (which is written in Haskell) and can also compile itself.

Given how well all of this works, perhaps Metacarp will become the best compiler to use for Carp programmers. Maybe it can even help me fulfill my personal dream of using Carp for an actual finished game? In any case, thanks Veit for all your hard work!