Get Started

Welcome to sailfin.dev

by The Sailfin Team

We’re excited to launch sailfin.dev — the official home for the Sailfin programming language.

Update (July 24, 2026): Dated posts preserve the status at publication. Since this post appeared, structured concurrency v0 has shipped in Sailfin 0.8, and the runtime migration to Sailfin has finished; no C runtime remains. Runtime source is Sailfin-native, with platform services reached through extern fn; native builds still lower through LLVM and link via clang plus the platform linker.

What You’ll Find Here

  • Getting Started guides to install Sailfin and write your first program
  • Learning resources covering the language from basics through advanced topics
  • Reference documentation including the language spec, grammar, and standard library
  • Contributing guides for anyone who wants to help build Sailfin

What is Sailfin?

Sailfin is a compiled systems language with compile-time capability enforcement. It features:

  • Effect types that declare what your code can do — IO, network, clock, and more — checked at compile time
  • Capability-based security — capsules declare required capabilities; undeclared effects are compile-time errors
  • A self-hosted native compiler targeting LLVM with single-binary output
  • Pragmatic ergonomics — conventional TypeScript/Rust-like syntax, good error messages with fix-it hints
  • Structured concurrency (planned at publication; shipped in 0.8) — routines, channels, and scoped parallelism as first-class constructs

Current Status

At publication, Sailfin was pre-1.0, with active development toward a pure Sailfin toolchain. The self-hosted compiler could compile itself, and the runtime migration from C to Sailfin was still underway. That migration is now complete.

Check out the roadmap to see what’s planned.

Get Involved

  • Browse the source on GitHub
  • Read the contributor guide
  • Try it out: curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SailfinIO/sailfin/main/install.sh | bash

We’re building Sailfin in the open and welcome contributions of all kinds — from code to documentation to feedback.