[b-man]

I would use something like typed racket or haskell for all the critical parts to increase safety. Then I would check the performance bottlenecks and rewrite them in C if needed.

Then I would use a more programmer friendly language on top of that. Something like Scheme, Ruby, Python and the like.

Stratified design, basically.

[rbanffy]

> I would use something like typed racket or haskell for all the critical parts to increase safety

I am not sure about Haskell, but, from my limited experience, Erlang runs at levels very close to C (my C, at least)

[davidw]

In terms of speed? Erlang's not even in the ballpark that C is in. I'm pretty sure Haskell significantly outperforms Erlang as well.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-lang...

[rbanffy]

Well... At least my C is regarded as very readable ;-)