Goose is a new systems language from Wouter van Oortmerssen (the FlatBuffers author) that hit the top of Hacker News today, and its homepage does not do modest. It claims, in order: memory safety with no heap allocator, no garbage collector and no lifetime annotations; a database record that takes 29 bytes in Goose versus 160 bytes and an allocation in C++ ; and, over sixteen benchmarks, 3.3x the speed of idiomatic C++ and 1.16x hand-optimized C++ , on less memory.

Language homepages say things. What I liked about this one is that several of its claims are small, exact and checkable in an afternoon. So I downloaded the current release (v2026.3, October 21; the repo is at 1,950 stars) and checked the small ones first.

My setup: the prebuilt Linux binary on a 2-vCPU AMD EPYC VM, gcc 13.3.…