From pioneering game engines to Google’s FlatBuffers and a new challenger to Rust and C++, Dutch software engineer Wouter van Oortmerssen has spent more than three decades rethinking how software should work.
Most developers spend their careers mastering existing programming languages and tools. Wouter van Oortmerssen has spent his career building alternatives.
Known online as Aardappel (POTATO in Dutch), is one of those rare engineers whose work spans programming languages, game engines, compilers, and software architecture. Although he isn’t a household name in technology, millions of developers have benefited, directly or indirectly, from technologies he helped create.
And after more than 30 years in software engineering, he’s still experimenting.
From Amiga to AAA Gaming
Van Oortmerssen’s programming journey began in the early days of personal computing.
He created Amiga E, a programming language that became popular among developers on Commodore’s Amiga computers. He also developed FALSE, an intentionally minimalist and unconventional language that helped inspire the esoteric programming-language movement.
His academic background includes a master’s degree from the University of Amsterdam and a PhD from the University of Southampton, both involving programming-language research.
At Crytek, he contributed to the original CryEngine and Far Cry. He later worked on technology associated with Borderlands 2 and SimCity.
Meanwhile, his open-source Cube Engine, and its successor Cube 2: Sauerbraten, demonstrated an unusual concept for their time: players could edit game environments collaboratively, directly inside a running 3D game.
The Google Years: Creating FlatBuffers
One of Van Oortmerssen’s most significant contributions came during his more than eight years at Google.
There, he created FlatBuffers, an open-source serialization library designed to make structured data extremely fast to access.
Traditional serialization systems often require applications to deserialize data into separate objects before using it. FlatBuffers allows applications to access serialized data directly, reducing memory allocations and processing overhead.
The technology became particularly useful in games, mobile applications, and other performance-sensitive systems.
At Google, he also worked on WebAssembly, LLVM, and technologies related to gaming and virtual reality.
His work consistently reflected the same engineering philosophy: software should be efficient without becoming unnecessarily complicated.
Goose
In 2026, Van Oortmerssen attracted renewed attention with Goose, an experimental systems programming language.
Goose explores an ambitious proposition: can a language deliver strong memory safety, exceptional performance, and simpler programming models without relying on conventional heap allocation, garbage collection, or reference counting?
Its approach emphasizes compact data structures, predictable memory lifetimes, and compiler-managed memory organization.
Van Oortmerssen has published benchmarks showing Goose outperforming C++ and Rust in selected workloads, particularly those involving tightly packed data structures.
These results are intriguing, but they aren’t proof that Goose is universally faster. Performance depends heavily on workloads, implementations, compiler maturity, and benchmark methodology.
Goose remains experimental, and challenging established languages involves far more than impressive performance numbers. Tooling, libraries, ecosystem maturity, and production reliability matter enormously.
Nevertheless, Goose represents a serious attempt to rethink some long-standing assumptions in systems programming.
Leaving Google to Build His Own Game
In January 2022, Van Oortmerssen announced that he was leaving Google to establish his own game-development company, VoxRay Games.
Its project, Voxile, is a voxel-based game built around ray-traced graphics, interactive environments, and player creativity.
Rather than simply using an established commercial engine, Van Oortmerssen has continued developing his own technology, including his Lobster programming language.
It’s an approach that gives him unusual technical freedom, but also carries substantial development and commercial risks.
The technology industry tends to celebrate founders, executives, and billion-dollar companies. Engineers who build foundational tools often receive considerably less attention.
Van Oortmerssen represents a different kind of technology pioneer: someone motivated by questioning the basic assumptions behind how software is built.
His career demonstrates that meaningful innovation often comes from developers willing to rebuild the foundations rather than accept them as permanent.
