NovaLang Roadmap

This roadmap communicates priorities, not guaranteed dates. Work may move between milestones as testing and user feedback reveal new risks.

0.2.0 Public Alpha

Release goal: a coherent, installable preview suitable for learning, experimentation, and early feedback.

• eliminate known correctness and crash bugs in interpreter, VM, optimizer, module graph, formatter, linter, and cache;
• preserve the current language syntax for alpha compatibility;
• establish diagnostic parity between CLI and VS Code Problems;
• publish reproducible Windows, Linux, and macOS artifacts with checksums;
• complete the getting-started guide, language reference, maintainer LEARN.md, troubleshooting, and release notes;
• establish CI, security policy, governance, contribution workflow, and dependency updates;
• clearly document unsupported syntax and pre-release limitations.

Exit criteria are tracked in docs/release/PLAN.md.

0.3 — Developer experience

• faster incremental analysis and cancellable LSP requests;
• stable formatter behavior and editor format-on-save;
• richer diagnostics, fixes, completion, hover, and navigation;
• package integrity verification and transactional installation;
• benchmark suite and tracked performance budgets.

0.4 — Language completeness

• resolve or implement syntax currently accepted but unsupported downstream;
• formalize module visibility and package boundaries;
• align interpreter and VM semantics through conformance tests;
• review standard-library API naming and error conventions.

Toward 1.0

• publish a versioned language specification and compatibility policy;
• define stable source, package, and bytecode compatibility guarantees;
• complete security hardening, fuzzing, and long-running stress tests;
• establish a proposal process for language evolution;
• validate the language with substantial real-world applications.

Explicitly out of scope for 0.2.0

• stable production guarantees;
• execution of untrusted programs without operating-system isolation;
• syntax redesign solely to distinguish NovaLang from other languages;
• compatibility guarantees for the internal bytecode format.