Back in October 2015 I joined GitLab. I think I was employee #28 at the time, with the total number of employees being somewhere between 30 and 40 if I'm not mistaken. Fast-forward to today, and GitLab has grown to almost 1600 employees.
While I enjoyed my time at GitLab, after a little over six years I feel it's time for something new. In particular, I want to be able to dedicate more time to Inko. With that in mind, I resigned from GitLab with my last day being December 31st 2021. Starting January 1st 2022, I'll be working on Inko full-time. The roadmap for 2022 is as follows:
For now I'm not adding more to the roadmap, as I'm not yet sure how productive I'll be once I start working on Inko full-time.
The new memory management strategy is something I'm most excited about. This strategy combines the efficient heap layout from Immix with a single-ownership model, but without the lifetimes complexity found in Rust. The ownership model is based on the paper Ownership You Can Count On: A Hybrid Approach to Safe Explicit Memory Management, though I intend to extend it with additional compile-time analysis and support for generic data structures that support both owned and borrowed values. Of course this approach comes with its own trade-offs, but I feel these trade-offs are worth making, and will make Inko a compelling alternative to languages such as Python, Ruby, and Erlang.
If you'd like to support the project financially, you can do so through GitHub Sponsors. And if you'd like to follow progress made on Inko, consider joining the Matrix channel, as I'll post short updates there from time to time. I also intend to start recording videos on the development of Inko and maybe start streaming, but I think it will take a bit of time before I have the courage to do so.