Current Status

Frost is mostly feature complete and generally pretty reliable at this point. It is bootstrapped (meaning the compiler is itself written in Frost) and there are hundreds of test programs, totalling nearly a hundred thousand lines of actively tested Frost code.

Frost's core APIs are currently quite limited. There is currently no networking, no graphics, no sound, no time and date API, etc.; these things will come eventually, but creating a language and comprehensive APIs is an enormous undertaking.

Performance is likely going to average out to "not generally too horrible" at the moment. Basic logic and arithmetic code should generally be around as fast as C, while some things are currently much slower than they should be. Frost hasn't undergone a lot of performance work yet, and there is definitely quite a bit of low-hanging fruit from an optimization standpoint. Array is a noteworthy offender: not only are there some frankly embarrassing inefficiencies in how refcounting works within Array, but generic specialization is not in place yet. This means that an array of a value type, such as Array<UInt8>, is currently treated internally exactly the same as Array<Object>. Every byte added to an Array<UInt8> therefore has to be converted into a full-blown heap-allocated object; probably not too big of a deal for a small array, but I definitely wouldn't recommend reading a multi-megabyte file into memory as an array of bytes. This will of course be fixed eventually.

Frost's program analysis and error detection is not yet complete. You can currently write programs which do not obey the rules in certain ways, causing undefined behavior and crashes. Of course, you can write broken code in something like C++ easily enough, too, so as long as you understand the rules it's not any worse than programming in most languages. Things to be aware of: