As I understand it, platforms have hosts that are assumed to be written in some other language, like Rust. Also, the Roc compiler is written in Rust and Zig. I'm curious if the future vision for the language eventually has Roc serving these purposes, like a Roc compiler written in Roc or Roc being the go-to choice for writing platform hosts.
this is a common question! The short answer is that the plan is explicitly to never use Roc for the compiler or for hosts :big_smile:
the basic reason in both cases is that both the compiler and hosts benefit a lot from low-level features that Roc should never introduce, such as memory unsafety
so it would be to Roc's detriment as a language if it were to introduce the features that would be necessary for it to be great at those use cases!
Last updated: Jul 06 2025 at 12:14 UTC