Goodbye Dark Inc. - Hello Darklang Inc.
Dark Inc has officially run out of money. Dark Inc is the company we founded in 2017 to build Darklang, a statically-typed functional programming language built to strip all of the bullshit from backend coding.
To ensure continuity for users and fans, as well as to continue building what we regard as an important technology, Dark Inc has sold the assets – the Darklang language, the blog, the hosted service, the Discord, etc, darklang.com, etc – to a new company started by Dark Inc's former employees.
The new company, Darklang Inc, was started recently by Stachu and Feriel to continue building Darklang in its new exciting direction. Rather than be tied to a single proprietary cloud backend and editing environment, Darklang will be open sourced, and designed to safely run anywhere - your laptop, your cloud, our cloud, etc.
Stachu is sharing a post alongside this one, outlining Darklang Inc’s vision and plans for the future.
Why didn't Dark Inc work out?
When we started Dark Inc, we expected it to be an immediately world-changing technology. The concept that stood out in Darklang was that, in addition to being serverless, the language was also "deployless" - meaning immediate and safe deployment of code.
Alas, in our dreams of incredible growth, and our promises to investors, we burned cash too quickly between 2017 and 2020. The product wasn't quite good enough back then to raise a Series A, and so we took our best shot: lowering how much we spent to last long enough to make the product amazing with a tiny team.
This was somewhat on track until ChatGPT came along and it became very obvious that our product was not the right one for the era of coding agents. Our online structured editor didn't make sense when the LLM is generating the code, and it's a separate place to how people are coding using LLMs and agents: in custom editors like Cursor, or Windsurf, and Copilot in VSCode.
Looking at how people use LLMs though, we realized there were new significant problems: how can you know it's safe to run the code created by the LLM? This turns minor issues -- package manager supply chain security anyone -- into major ones. A great solution to this was already present in Darklang code - immutability. Immutability was the secret sauce of Darklang v1, and immutability was a solution for many of the issues created in the new world.
Immutability means that side-effects, the most common way of doing things in most OO languages such as Python or Javascript, can't exist. This makes it far far easier for humans to read code written by Coding Agent, easier to understand code, and easier to safely run code in an LLM or agent environment, and to replay code that had been run before to understand it.
Selling to employees
We started focusing on these in 2023, taking the remainder of our cash and trying to get to a new iteration of Darklang. However, we did not get a product out in time to be able to change our trajectory, and ran out of money earlier this year.
In conversation with our investors and the board, we believed that the best way forward was to shut down the company, as it was clear that an 8 year old product with no traction was not going to attract new investment. In our discussions, we agreed that continuity of the product was in the best interest of the users and the community (and of both founders and investors, who do not enjoy being blamed for shutting down tools they can no longer afford to run), and we agreed that this could best be achieved by selling it to the employees.
I also personally invested in the new company to give it a few years of runway. As well as supporting users, this was also to provide a future for a product and technology I personally worked on for 8 years and really believe in. I believe that Darklang has huge potential, solving problems that pervade every major programming language out there. It is also a lovely language and a joy to code in.
I'm very grateful for all those who were involved in Dark Inc's journey: the investors who believed in us (and the feedback from those who didn't), my cofounder Ellen, the early team especially Ian, all of our users, our advisors and friends, and to Stachu and Feriel for taking over the development of the language and product. I look forward to seeing the amazing work to come out of Darklang Inc – the new owners of darklang.com.
Personally, my journey has gone in an unexpected direction. Since last year I have been founder and CEO of Tech for Palestine, a group working to educate the tech industry about the occupation of Palestine, and the apartheid and genocide inflicted on Palestinians by Israel for over 75 years.
Tech, as many know, is inherently political, and as we see Big Tech cozying up to fascism, there are many in the industry who put morality and ethics above money and profits. This was a big issue for us when we created Dark Inc in 2017, and it's a big issue today. I am comforted that these values are shared by Darklang Inc as well.
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