[extheat]

I am skeptical about the performance part (object lifecycle management being a subset of that), whether this is a serious issue causing bottlenecks in modern (not over engineered) production software. It seems to me that subset of software that needs the performance (like hashing, large binary data processing, geometric processing, etc) are things that should be offloaded to GPU for real performance or if it has to be done on the CPU, be run under optimized WebAssembly with no dynamic memory allocations. Since JavaScript has a very good packaging ecosystem compared to other languages, often you don't even have to go out of your way to do that. Someone else has probably done it, and it may just be a require("xxhash") away.

I think it's quite backward thinking actually to bend the language making it more complex for the human for the benefit of the compiler. Especially with the shift to LLMs, programming languages should be closer to natural language and expression, not vice versa.

The good JS packaging ecosystem takes care of the small standard library issue, but I definitely agree there's room for expansion there. This seems like a surmountable problem. And by standard lib I'm not talking about things that can be trivially be implemented with Array/Object/Map (like queues or ordered maps), I mean things like RNG, math functions, or things like the recently added `fetch` method for HTTP calls.