About

software 4sd builds tools that translate one form of software into another: a domain language into a model, a model into code, a binary frame into text and back. The product is genc³.

People

software 4sd is one person, Jörg Brüggmann, Dipl.-Ing. (FH) in Computer Engineering (Technische Informatik), TFH Berlin, writing software professionally since 1988. More on LinkedIn.

The idea

Software is built in layers of abstraction. Each layer is translated into the next by a generator, a script or a hand-written tool, and each of them has to be kept consistent with the others. genc³ makes every step one rule file and chains the steps into a build network that rebuilds only what an edit changed.

What is available today

genc³ 0.28.2.0, genc³wb 0.16.1.0, October 2026 — internal releases, available to design partners:

  • Networks of translators, built once like a build system or standing, so that an edit is passed on through the chain as edit deltas.
  • Incremental parsing and generation: an edit re-parses and re-generates only what changed.
  • One grammar for text and bits: characters in UTF-8, ISO 8859-1 or Windows-1252, bit and octet literals, indentation-sensitive syntax; outputs as text or bit-level binary.
  • Left-recursive rules, direct and indirect, are parsed as written; ordered choice gives an input never two parses.
  • Statically typed generator rules, their types inferred when the rule file is read.
  • The workbench genc³wb: it shows the network as a graph while it is evaluated, opens each step with its rule file, inputs and outputs, marks diagnostics where they belong, and shows the outputs after every accepted change; inputs and outputs are edited as text, hex or bits.
  • 2,303 tests pass on genc³ 0.28.2.0.
Three node windows of genc³wb over the network view: the input model.cls of the node norm shown as txt, hex and bin, beside the rule file norm.gc3 and the generated output model.rec
Node windows of genc³wb: the same input shown as txt, hex and bin, next to the rule file and the generated output

Planned

  • Builds for Linux and Windows (today: macOS on Apple silicon).
  • Integration into existing IDEs through the Language Server Protocol.
  • AI assistance for writing rule files.
  • A marketplace for genc³ solutions.

The notation may still change before version 1.0.

Working with us

We are looking for a few design partners: teams that translate formats or models in several steps and want to try genc³ on a real case. Contact form