Hey, everyone. Alex Voste here — the person behind ForgeZero and its resident experimental language, Gloria. I've written plenty about the engineering internals on this blog already, but I realized I never actually introduced the why, or told you where to go if you want to watch this thing get built in real time instead of reading about it after the fact. Let's fix both.
The Origin Story, Condensed
I wanted total control. Over the code, over the hardware, over every byte between my logic and the CPU actually executing it. What I kept running into instead was an industry quietly content with heavy runtimes, abstraction stacked on abstraction, and garbage collectors that show up uninvited in the middle of your hot path like a relative who "was just in the neighbourhood." None of that is evil. Most of it is genuinely useful for most people. It is also, for the specific thing I wanted to build, a tax I was no longer willing to pay.
So I built ForgeZero — an orchestration toolchain for assembly, C, C++, Objective-C, and Gloria, designed to get projects built without Makefiles, without a pile of configuration nobody fully understands, and without the "trust me" energy most build systems ask of you. It's fast, it's memory-conscious, and critically, it never asks you to take anything on faith — every cache decision, every toolchain choice, every flag is something you can actually see, not something an abstraction layer quietly decided on your behalf. GitHub's right here: github.com/forgezero-cli.
Then Gloria Happened, Because One Obsession Is Never Enough
Once ForgeZero existed, I wanted a language to go with it — something low-level and genuinely powerful, but without the syntax feeling like a punishment for wanting control. You've probably already seen a few of the pieces I'm proudest of: chained file operations with >>, error propagation with |? that doesn't force you into a pyramid of nested checks, and repeat loops that read the way you'd actually describe the loop out loud instead of the way a 1970s compiler wanted you to describe it.
There is no garbage collector in Gloria. There are no comfortable abstractions sitting between you and the machine. Gloria compiles straight to raw x86_64 binary and talks to the operating system directly through syscalls, because every layer between your intent and the instruction stream is a layer that can lie to you about what's actually happening. I'd rather know exactly what's happening, even when what's happening is occasionally my own fault.
Yes, I Use AI. No, It Doesn't Get to Make the Decisions.
I don't build this alone — I keep a neural net around as a constant sparring partner. It's genuinely useful for kicking around new syntax ideas, helping refactor, stress-testing a concept before I commit to it, and yes, occasionally helping me phrase a post like this one without sounding like I've been awake for thirty hours (I frequently have been).
What it doesn't get is unsupervised trust. If you've read my other posts here, you already know my relationship with AI-generated code is closer to "overconfident intern I review like a hostile code auditor" than "pair programmer I defer to." It's a tool that accelerates thinking. It is not the thing doing the thinking, and it never gets anywhere near the parts of this project where a mistake means a corrupted binary instead of an awkward sentence.
Where Gloria Actually Stands Right Now
We've got solid, working filesystem interaction — reading and writing data confidently, not as a toy demo. Right now the active front line is dynamic arrays (vectors), which isn't a feature for its own sake — it's the foundation everything downstream actually needs, the language and the compiler both.
Where This Is Going
Networking is next — full socket support, which cracks the door open to high-performance servers, network utilities, and game engines written in Gloria, with nothing hiding between your code and the actual packets going over the wire.
And the actual north star, the thing I'm building all of this toward: self-hosting. The day ForgeZero's compiler for Gloria is itself written in Gloria is the day this entire project proves its own premise. Until a language can bootstrap itself, it's still borrowing credibility from whatever built it. I want Gloria standing entirely on its own.
Come Build It With Us
If any of this sounds like your kind of problem — if you genuinely enjoy getting into the hardware, obsessing over a single instruction more than is strictly healthy, and want to watch something real, low-level, and unapologetically system-oriented get built in public, not just read the polished retrospective six months later — this is your invitation.
We post live updates, real bugs, actual wins, and everything happening behind the curtain on our Telegram channel: t.me/forgezeroteam
No garbage collectors were harmed in the making of this project. Several were, however, deeply and personally offended.
