[Animats]

Almost certainly someone will wrote a more declarative language on top of it

Papering over the mold seldom works. It makes things easier, not more reliable. See C++ templates.

[Animats]

Note that putting a language on top of the existing language won't prevent VM stack overflows of the type used in the attack. It's more likely to hide them.

[drcode]

A better example is Haskell, which usually compiles down to a low level C dialect.

[amaks]

Any language can compile to the low level C dialect.