Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust

A few weeks ago I saw a post about someone converting an entire C++ codebase to Rust using AI in under two weeks.

That inspired me — if AI can rewrite a whole language stack that fast, I wanted to try building a programming language from scratch with AI assistance.

I've also been noticing growing global interest in Korean language and culture, and I wondered: what would a programming language look like if every keyword was in Hangul (the Korean writing system)?

Han is the result. It's a statically-typed language written in Rust with a full compiler pipeline (lexer → parser → AST → interpreter + LLVM IR codegen).

It supports arrays, structs with impl blocks, closures, pattern matching, try/catch, file I/O, module imports, a REPL, and a basic LSP server.

This is a side project, not a "you should use this instead of Python" pitch. Feedback on language design, compiler architecture, or the Korean keyword choices is very welcome.

https://github.com/xodn348/han

Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust
github.com

I don't know Korean at all, but this looks cool and a fun project. I'm curious if this reduces typing or has any benefits being in Hangul vs Latin?

[flagged]

Very Interesting...

I have similar idea to train LLM in Serbian, create even new encoding https://github.com/topce/YUTF-8 inspired by YUSCII. Did not have time and money ;-) Great that you succeed. Idea if train in Serbian text encoded in YUTF-8 (not UTF-8) it will have less token when prompt in Serbian then English, also Serbian Cyrillic characters are 1 byte in YUTF-8 instead of 2 in UTF.Serbian language is phonetic we never ask how you spell it.Have Latin and Cyrillic letters.

Korean doesn’t reduce typing compared to English from my experience. What looks like a “character” is actually a syllable block called “eumjeol” that’s made up of consonants (moeum)and vowels (jaeum). You can’t have a vowel only syllable either so you always have to pair it with a null consonant no matter what (which kinda looks like a zero: ㅇ) and while nouns can be much more concise compared to English, verbs can get verbose.

The main benefit of Korean actually comes from the fact that the language itself fits perfectly into a standard 27 alphabet keys and laid out in such a way that lets you type ridiculously fast. The consonant letters are always situated in the left half and the vowels are in the right half of the keyboard. This means it is extremely easy to train muscle memory because you’re mostly alternating keystrokes on your left hand and right hand.

Anecdotally I feel like when I’m typing in English, each half of my brain needs to coordinate more compared to when I’m typing in Korean, the right brain only need to remember the consonant positions for my left hand and my left brain only need to remember the vowel positions.