I’ve been building Sapphire, a lightweight, batteries-included programming language written in C++. I wanted a language that was fast enough for systems work but simple enough for quick UI tools, all while remaining a single, portable binary.

You can try it out here: github.com/foxzyt/Sapphire

I just completed a major overhaul of the VM. By migrating from a switch-case dispatch to Direct Threading (Computed GOTOs), I achieved a performance boost of 1000% over the previous architecture. It currently handles 100 billion iterations in ~9 seconds on a consumer CPU without a JIT.

What you can do with it right now:

Run UI apps instantly: It has a built-in Immediate Mode UI (SapphireUI). No external DLLs or complex setups required.

Portable scripts: The entire environment (VM + UI + Networking + JSON) is a 12MB standalone binary.

Compiled Bytecode: Use sapphire compile to turn scripts into .sbc files, skipping the parsing stage for near-instant startup.

How to try it:

Download the binary from the link above.

Run test scripts from the /tests folder.

No signups, no emails, just a portable executable.

I’m looking for contributors: Maintaining a language, its standard library, and a custom UI engine is a huge task for one person. I'm looking for people to help with the core VM development, documentation, and the standard library. If you're interested in systems programming, VM architecture, or UI engines, I'd love to have you on board!

I'll be around to answer any questions about the VM architecture, the bytecode serialization, or the UI implementation.