Most languages were made for humans. University of Michigan professor Jason Mars thinks agents need their own. The Register covered his talk at All Things Open in Raleigh on Jac, and its runtime Jaseci.
What Jac does
- “We’re using the agents, and the agents are using those tools,” Mars said. He wants tools built for agents.
- Jac is Python-like but pulls in both Python and TypeScript runtimes. It compiles to Python bytecode, JavaScript and native code, and can use PyPI and npm libraries.
- Through LLVM it adds Rust-style borrow checking and can import C and C++ libraries. An “eject” feature turns Jac back into TypeScript, Python or C for compliance. No Java.
- Data lives as a graph of nodes and edges, and “walkers” traverse it, so agents don’t burn tokens pulling data out of tables and JSON blobs.
- His jab: Bun’s creator reportedly spent $165,000 in Anthropic tokens with a pre-release Mythos to port Bun from Zig to Rust, mostly because of translating between two human languages.
My take
I’m curious but skeptical. “One language to eat them all” has been promised a lot of times. Still, the graph-plus-walkers idea is interesting for agents, and I might poke at it on a weekend. I’m not moving anything real to it yet.
Have a blessed day! And Happy Hacking!
