floyd

I also think an imperative language that's preliminary immutable, that uses higher order functions (and some other techniques to get performance). I think this is the future of programming and can be taken much further than current languages. <shameless self promotion> I'm working on a language for this. Right now it uses LLVM to compile to native and uses HAMT (see Clojure) to store data. It looks similar to Javascript. https://github.com/Floydlang/floyd There are no references in Floyd, only values. This opens possibilities of great performance without complex/risk analysis of ptrs and aliasing. The next phase is to create an intermediate AST (equivalent to your idea about compile-to-LISP) that lets programmer/tool tweak how the data structures map to the HW. I'd love to pick your brain about these ideas!

You seem to have some goals in common with Floyd. Maybe you want to get in touch. https://github.com/marcusz/floyd https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/arwjl...