Kaya is a compiled statically typed (ie, types are checked at compile time) imperative programming language; unlike other such languages, however, types are inferred rather than declared - there is no need for type declarations of local variables. kaya has "tagged union" data structures, a powerful feature more commonly found in functional languages such as ocaml and haskell.

kaya also has built-in abstractions for web application development, making it easy to write a cgi program without paying too much attention to low level details such as state management and form handling.