About Hilde

Hilde is made by Heiko Zimmermann. It is a fork of Austral by Fernando Borretti and is developed in its own Gitea; its repositories are linked at the foot of every page. Questions and patches go to the address in the imprint.

The name

HILDE stands for High-Integrity, Linear, Deterministic, Explicit.

Source files end in .hiq, interfaces in .hih. The h in .hih stands for header, as in C; .hiq is a play on "high IQ", and the q also stands for query.

The name compares the language with a cat: a walking cat sets each hind paw exactly into the print of its front paw, every step placed once and never twice, as linear types do with a value; and a cat is loud when something is wrong, as Hilde's error messages are.

Hilde and Wolly

Hilde and Wolly really exist: two house cats, European Shorthair, Hilde white and grey, Wolly brown and white. The two belong together, and so the language and the web framework carry their names.