Nezha: smaller, tougher, and less patient with baggage.

Nezha is Aiki's smaller, tougher sibling. The name comes from the youthful warrior of Chinese mythology: formidable despite his size, independent-minded, and not especially interested in accepting the way things have always been done.

Aiki gave Nezha its starting point. Nezha is an effort to pare the language down and tackle a harder question: can the essential acts of program evaluation be described by a small, finite declarative vocabulary, rather than buried inside a handwritten evaluator?

The current implementation is a working language with .nez source files, a parser, formatter, evaluator, and an executable reference corpus. The larger experiment is still in progress.

The intended separation is:

syntax
  +
evaluation specification
  |
  v
common evaluation contract
  |
  +-- interpreter
  +-- virtual machine
  +-- native implementation

That is a research direction, not a claim that three backends already exist. Right now the evaluator is handwritten; the task is to determine which operations are truly fundamental and whether their behavior can be stated independently of that implementation.

Oh, and there is a block-based user interface thrown in as an experiment. It uses Blockly inside a Wails desktop wrapper to assemble programs visually and generate Nezha source. It is not the central architectural project, but it is fun to play with.

Nezha experimental Blockly interface

The language can be built and exercised from the command line:

make build
make reference
make validate-lang

Source, design notes, and the development baseline:

https://github.com/decuser/nezha

The ambition isn't to make Aiki larger by another name. It is to find out just how small—and how precise—the mechanism underneath a programming language can be.

post added 2026-10-17 16:16:00 -0500