Goose: 1.16x faster than C++ and 1.12x than safe Rust, while memory safe

Goose is a memory-safe systems programming language built around a single radical idea: there is no heap. Every dynamic value lives inline on compiler-managed data stacks; growth is a pointer bump and scope exit is the only free. That design removes allocators, garbage collection, reference counting and destructors, yielding dramatic resource and speed wins on benchmarks: across sixteen tests Goose reports 3.3× idiomatic C++ speed, 1.16× hand-optimized C++, and 1.12× the best safe Rust while using less memory (summary and full results available). Nothing ever moves, so references into growing arrays remain valid, relative links can be stored in 1-4 byte offsets, and values are constructed directly in their final destination. Goose compiles to a single C file (TinyCC backend included) and interoperates with plain C.

The language enforces safety without lifetime annotations by inferring a static root for every reference and rejecting only outliving the owner. Its array and string family is “flat all the way down”: variable-size fields sit inline, arrays can be fixed, frozen, capacity-inline, grow-only, or builders, and a record with variable parts can be a single contiguous block (example: an Order becomes 29 bytes with zero allocations). Algebraic data types support fixed and variable storage modes so a variant can occupy exactly its payload size. Other notable features include zero-overhead generics via untyped parameters, statically checked multi-frame error returns, and threads that share nothing (workers are separate programs passing flat values by memcpy).