[DonaldFisk]

It doesn't have to be just another abstraction layer. In Full Metal Jacket, there's no underlying human-readable text-based language. The abstract machine it's designed to run on is highly-concurrent (MIMD) dataflow, which is very different from the von-Neumann architecture. You can represent concurrency visually better and more clearly than textually, though a few dataflow-based textual languages exist such as SISAL.

At present, FMJ is interpreted and runs on a virtual dataflow machine. This was a necessary step to ensure the computation model was implemented accurately. Compilation to run on a single processor would actually be simplified, however: there's no parsing or dataflow analysis required. Looking into the future, the question that should really be asked is whether languages designed to run on a single processor, or to execute the same instructions in parallel (SIMD), can be easily adapted to run on MIMD architectures. Do you really want to be using MPI?