Today we celebrate a significant milestone for the Gren programming language. Gren is no longer developed by a single developer, but by a core team.

The core packages have been updated with new functionality and quality-of-life improvements. The compiler has started its transition from Haskell to Gren. The book has seen a face lift, and Zulip has been replaced by Discord.

The first few lines of a new Gren compiler are being written this week. The goal is to better support upcoming features of the language, as well as being easier to maintain and debug. The hope is also that it will be easier for the community to contribute, as the new compiler is being written in Gren itself.

JavaScript developers have always had access to a powerful debugger for finding bugs in their applications. Since Gren compiles to JavaScript, it's also possible to use the same tool for debugging Gren applications. The experience isn't great, however, as you're forced to debug the JavaScript that the compiler spits out instead of the actual code you wrote.

The original plan was to not do another release until Gren 0.3 this summer but, while this is still the goal, we've implemented enough functionality to warrant a new release today. The theme for Gren 0.3 is "Testing and Debugging", and Gren 0.2.1 delivers on the first half of this theme.

Six months after the release of 0.1, a new release is here with a bunch of exciting features. This includes a built-in code formatter and basic support for creating applications that run on NodeJS.

A crucial aspect of any programming language, is how easy it is to discover and learn new functionality.

Today marks the first release of Gren, a programming language that helps you write simple and correct software.