Ceylon is a modern, modular, statically typed programming language for the Java and JavaScript virtual machines. The first production release of the Ceylon language specification, compiler, and IDE are now available.

Ceylon is a language designed for writing large programs in teams. It is derived from C and was first announced to the world at QCon in Bejing in April 2011.

It originated as an open source language fostered by RedHat and reached the first of the five milestones it had to pass on its way to Version 1.0 in December 2011. Version 1.0 was released in September 2013 and now, less than two months later Ceylon 1.0.0 is officially available for download

According to the launch announcement by its creator, Gavin King, the release includes:

• a complete formal language specification that defines the syntax and semantics of Ceylon in language accessible to the professional developer
  
  
• a command line toolset including compilers for Java and JavaScript, a documentation compiler, and support for executing modular programs on the JVM and Node.js
  
  
• the language module
  
• the Ceylon SDK
  
  
• an Eclipse-based integrated development environment

Ceylon has been designed to be highly understandable object-oriented language with static typing. It  features, again according to Gavin King's blog post, are:

• an emphasis upon readability and a strong bias toward omission or elimination of potentially-harmful constructs
  
  
• an extremely powerful type system combining subtype and parametric polymorphism with declaration-site variance, including first-class union and intersection types, and using principal types for local type inference and flow-dependent typing
  
  
• a unique treatment of function and tuple types, enabling powerful abstractions
  
  
• first-class constructs for defining modules and dependencies between modules
  
  
• a very flexible syntax including comprehensions and support for expressing tree-like structures
  
  
• fully-reified generic types, on both the JVM and JavaScript virtual machines, and a unique typesafe metamodel.