{
  "id": 9871260,
  "title": "Valen creator drives 'Golden Spike' to connect new languages with Rust",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/25/valen-creator-drives-golden-spike-to-connect-new-languages-with-rust-9871260",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-09-25T20:15:44.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "The Register Science",
    "slug": "the-register-science",
    "url": "https://www.theregister.com/devops/2026/09/25/valen-creator-drives-golden-spike-to-connect-new-languages-with-rust/5299273"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Programming language generics can now journey seamlessly between compilers, thanks to the experimental work of Evan Ovadia, a former Google engineer and Mojo core contributor. Ovadia sought to turn Rust into a library that other languages could utilize, demonstrating a method to transfer generic data types and functions between Rust and another language—something the C ABI doesn't support.\n\nOvadia described his groundbreaking achievement in an explanatory blog post as the \"Golden Spike\" that connects two different languages, drawing a parallel to the final spike driven into the United States' first transcontinental railroad line. Rather than reducing rich libraries to raw primitives to fit into the coarse wagons of the C ABI, Ovadia's work enables libraries with substantial capabilities to travel swiftly across foreign ecosystems.\n\nThe work originated from Ovadia's ambition to create his own language, Valen—a faster, more developer-friendly version of Rust. He reasoned that creating a new language from scratch posed challenges in utilizing his favorite Rust libraries, especially without the stability guarantees offered by the C ABI.\n\nThe C ABI, a de facto interoperability layer for passing data and function calls between compiled code, typically faces limitations when dealing with generic data types. As C lacks generics, its ABI cannot handle this concept. Ovadia needed a solution to enable cross-language generics, allowing Valen to call Rust generic functions and vice versa.\n\nTo achieve this, Ovadia introduced a two-part solution: first, running the Rust compiler as a library, leveraging Rust's existing capability (rustc_driver), which would allow Valen to embed rustc directly into its memory space. Second, patching the Rust compiler to handle non-Rust Valen types, delegating control to the Valen compiler for those portions, and awaiting the compiled result.\n\nOvadia acknowledges the \"nuclear option\" nature of patching the Rust compiler, which is only around 100 lines of code but considered hacky due to its assumptions about Rust's LLVM usage. Despite the risks, Ovadia's cross-language bidirectional generics mark a significant step forward in programming language interoperability, potentially paving the way for Rust to bootstrap other new languages built from Rust libraries.",
  "summary": "An experiment is afoot to sidestep C as the language of interoperability with Rust",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 2,
    "also_reported_by": [
      {
        "outlet": "The Register",
        "title": "Valen creator drives 'Golden Spike' to connect new languages with Rust",
        "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/25/valen-creator-drives-golden-spike-to-connect-new-languages-with-rust",
        "published": "2026-09-25T20:15:44.000Z"
      }
    ]
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}