What Beans is

Beans is a small object-oriented programming language. It has classes, interfaces, and inheritance with reference semantics, on top of a small grammar. It has predictable ownership and direct access to the operating system.

Source files end in .b.

Built to be exact and low-level

Beans is built to be both exact and low-level. Most design choices serve one or both of those — which is why it is as comfortable with business software as with systems work.

Business apps

Accounting, ERP, and billing: programs where a wrong number is a real problem. For this work Beans gives you:

• Mandatory explicit types. Every name says what it is, so code stays readable months later.
• Exact decimal arithmetic. 19.99 * 3 is 59.97 exactly, not a float that is almost right.
• No null and no exceptions. Missing values use Option<T>; failures use Result<T>. There is no hidden control flow.

Systems work

Databases, operating systems, and hardware control: programs that touch the machine directly. For this work Beans gives you:

• Sized integers like i32 and u64, and value types (struct, union).
• An unsafe layer with raw memory and C interop.
• No garbage-collector pauses. Memory is managed with automatic reference counting plus a cycle collector, so no tracing collector stops your program at random.

One tool: beansc

There is a single command, beansc, and it is the whole toolchain:

• a type checker that verifies your program,
• a reference interpreter that runs it with no build step,
• a native LLVM backend that compiles it to a real binary,
• a package manager (beansc pot),
• a language server (LSP) for editors, and
• a debugger (DAP).

beansc is self-hosted: the Beans compiler is written in Beans and compiles itself.

A tiny example

Here is a complete Beans program. Save it as hello.b.

import std.io

fn main() {
    let name: string = "beans"
    io.println("hello from {name}")
}

{name} inside the string is interpolation: it prints the value of name. Run it with:

beansc run hello.b

hello from beans

Next, read the language philosophy for the rules behind these choices, or install Beans and run your first program.