A new experimental language called Goose claims to run faster than both C++ and Rust's safe mode, while still guaranteeing memory safety.
The project lives on GitHub under the handle aardappel, pitched as an experimental language rather than a finished product. Its repository states benchmark results showing it running 1.16 times faster than C++ and 1.12 times faster than Rust's safe subset, all while keeping memory-safety guarantees intact. The post surfaced on Hacker News on September 18, 2026, and quickly picked up 43 points and 39 comments. The source material offers no benchmark methodology, test hardware, or code samples beyond the repository itself.
Beating C++ on raw speed is a claim plenty of languages have made and few have sustained once real-world codebases and tooling maturity enter the picture. Beating safe Rust specifically is the sharper claim, since Rust's ownership model is usually the tax paid for memory safety - if Goose really delivers both without that overhead, it is worth watching closely.
Right now Goose is a GitHub repository and a Hacker News thread, not a language with a package ecosystem or production users, so treat the numbers as a pitch until someone outside the project reproduces them.