[zeRusski]

Effort stats for both Whalesong and Pyret are impressive and humbling. Manifesto actually touches the importance of tackling "assemblers" including JavaScript, so I hope someone's actively researching the problem: performant Whalesong perhaps, or an entirely different approach.

[shriramkmurthi]

Whalesong is moribund for now. The Pyret intermediate language is actually a really good compilation target for functional languages. The problem is that Racket has a lot more stuff than Pyret (some of which are discussed in the paper, others are things like delimited continuations). There's certainly a Racket-lite that drops these features, is still a very full language, and would compile very nicely to Pyret. Anyone want to help us build that? (-:

[zeRusski]

That was my suspicion as well: there could be a very usable and rich subset of Racket that could target JS without significant performance degradation. Sidestepping the deeper darker corners like I think ClojureScript does with Clojure? Herculean effort already it becomes even more daunting when you start picking up features to drop only to discover just how much of Racket depends on say delimeted control machinery. After all Racketeers have been eating their dog food so most if not all their PL research found its way into the design. Bitten by their own success :) The manifesto takes admirably healthy stance here: problems offer opportunity for research. Alas, when u consider the time it takes to build smth like Pyret or Whalesong your pool of researchers and implementers narrows pretty much to academia. Unless of course there's some benefactor who's willing to assume the expense and allow the time