Wlangage (WLanguage)

Wlangage — spelled variously W-Langage in French sources and WLanguage in PC SOFT’s English documentation — is the proprietary programming language embedded in WINDEV, WEBDEV and WINDEV Mobile, the integrated rapid-application-development suite sold by PC SOFT of Montpellier, France since the early 1990s. Practically invisible in the English-speaking world and absent from mainstream popularity indexes, it is nonetheless one of the most commercially consequential “regional” languages ever built: its publisher claims a community of more than 180,000 professional developers, and an outsized share of the ERP, point-of-sale and back-office software running French businesses is written in it. Its most famous trait is that the same language can be written with French or English keywords — SI...ALORS...FIN or IF...THEN...END — and the IDE can translate source code between the two.

A Note on the Name

The language has never had one settled spelling. PC SOFT’s current English materials call it WLanguage; French articles and older documentation write W-Langage or WLangage; encyclopedia listings (including this one) sometimes carry the run-together form Wlangage. All of these name the same thing: the single integrated language of the WINDEV product family. The “W” is inherited from WINDEV itself — the language exists only inside PC SOFT’s tools and has no independent implementation, standard, or version number of its own.

History & Origins

PC SOFT was founded on August 10, 1984 in Montpellier by Patrice Prut, Stéphane Lambert, Gilles Lucato and Jean-Pierre Vignocchi. The company found its identity with HIGH SCREEN (1986), a DOS screen-interface generator that let developers draw data-entry screens visually and wire them to code in various languages; PC SOFT reports it sold about 10,000 copies in the United States. The lesson the founders drew — start from the screens and the data, and generate as much of the rest as possible — became the blueprint for everything that followed.

As Microsoft Windows made graphical interfaces the norm, PC SOFT built a complete atelier de génie logiciel (software engineering workshop) of its own. WINDEV 1.0 shipped in 1993, bundling a visual window editor, the Hyper File database engine (ancestor of today’s HFSQL), a report generator — and a brand-new high-level language to glue it all together. That language was Wlangage; some sources date its creation to around 1992, during WINDEV’s development. PC SOFT has described it over the years as a fourth- and even fifth-generation language, with the famous accompanying slogan that its tools let developers “develop 10 times faster” — a marketing claim rather than a measured benchmark, but a fair statement of intent.

The suite then grew around the language rather than the other way round. WEBDEV (version 1.5 in 2001, with numbering aligned to WINDEV’s at version 7 in 2003) carried WLanguage into server-side web development, and WINDEV Mobile arrived in the 2000s for handheld devices — initially Pocket PC and smartphones, today Android and iOS per PC SOFT’s documentation. All three products share the same language, the same project format, and since the 2000s a single common version number.

Design Philosophy

Wlangage is the purest surviving expression of the integrated-RAD idea: the language, the IDE, the database and the deployment tooling are one product, and the language’s job is to read like the business requirement it implements. Several principles define it:

• Bilingual by design. Keywords and the built-in function library exist in both French and English (the development environment is also available in Chinese), and the IDE can translate a program’s source between languages. Compteur est un entier and Counter is int are the same line of code.
• One code base, every target. The same WLanguage source is shared across WINDEV (Windows desktop, with Linux, .NET and Java targets also described in third-party accounts), WEBDEV (web) and WINDEV Mobile (Android and iOS).
• A gigantic built-in library. PC SOFT documents thousands of WLanguage functions covering strings, database access, PDF generation, web services, telephony and device hardware — the standard library is the platform.
• Data first. The bundled HFSQL engine, query editor and report writer are first-class citizens, with automatic data binding between UI controls and database fields — a reflection of the suite’s focus on gestion, French for data-driven business management software.

The deliberate trade-off is total lock-in: Wlangage programs can only be created, compiled and maintained with PC SOFT’s tools.

Key Features

• Dual-syntax source code — French or English keywords for identical semantics, with IDE-assisted translation between them.
• Procedural core, object-oriented extensions — imperative and procedural programming plus class-based OOP.
• Declared, forgiving typing — variables carry explicit declared types (X is int, Nom est une chaîne), while the runtime performs many automatic conversions.
• Bytecode execution — programs compile to bytecode run by PC SOFT’s runtime virtual machine.
• Everything integrated — visual editors, HFSQL database, report generator, installer builder and lifecycle tooling ship as one inseparable environment.

The language’s celebrated party trick, side by side:

// English keywords
Counter is int
FOR Counter = 1 TO 5
	Info("Hello, World! #" + Counter)
END

// Mots-clés français
Compteur est un entier
POUR Compteur = 1 À 5
	Info("Bonjour tout le monde ! #" + Compteur)
FIN

Evolution

For over three decades Wlangage has evolved strictly in step with its host products. PC SOFT settled into an annual release rhythm — version 25 arrived in December 2019, for instance — with each generation advertising hundreds of new features across language, IDE and runtimes. Object orientation, web and mobile targets, and an ever-expanding function library were layered onto the procedural core, while the bundled database progressed from Hyper File through HyperFileSQL to HFSQL.

The most dramatic changes in the language’s history, however, have been corporate rather than technical. With the generation after version 28, PC SOFT switched to year-based branding (WINDEV 2024, 2025, 2026). Then, in November 2024, PC SOFT was acquired by Two Squared France II, an acquisition vehicle of Canada’s Constellation Software and its Volaris Group subsidiary — a deal Volaris announced publicly on May 26, 2025. Under the new owners, PC SOFT’s traditional perpetual, dongle-protected licenses gave way to a subscription model, provoking the sharpest unrest the famously loyal French community has ever shown: the formation of the Wx Alliance advocacy group, heated forum campaigns, and written questions in the French National Assembly about the acquisition’s economic and security implications.

Current Relevance

Wlangage lives a double life. Globally, it is a footnote — it is absent from the TIOBE index’s published rankings, and English-language tutorials are scarce. In France, it is infrastructure: thousands of software vendors and in-house IT teams maintain WINDEV code bases running ERPs, point-of-sale systems, and medical and logistics applications, with organizations from Groupama to Honda France cited among users of WINDEV-built software. PC SOFT reports a worldwide community of more than 180,000 professional developers (a company figure).

The platform is demonstrably alive — the 2026 versions of WINDEV, WEBDEV and WINDEV Mobile shipped on December 12, 2025 — but the ecosystem stands at an inflection point. The end of perpetual licenses under Constellation/Volaris ownership has turned long-standing theoretical worries about vendor lock-in into an urgent, community-wide debate about whether new projects should still begin in Wlangage at all.

Why It Matters

Three lessons make Wlangage worth studying regardless of whether you ever write a line of it. First, it is the strongest existing proof that a commercially significant programming language can be non-Anglophone: its bilingual keyword system opened programming to a generation of French developers on their own linguistic terms, and remains nearly unique. Second, it is the longest-running success of the fully integrated proprietary RAD model — language, IDE, database and deployment sold as one product — an approach the rest of the industry abandoned but PC SOFT sustained profitably for forty years. Third, its current turbulence is a real-time case study in platform risk: when only one vendor on Earth can compile your application portfolio, that vendor’s ownership structure becomes your single point of failure. Wlangage is what a parallel, non-English software industry actually looks like — tens of thousands of businesses running, quite happily until recently, on SI...ALORS...FIN.