I'm impressed by the bbv idea, but not about the startup-time overhead which is even worse than perl6 or the jvm. Even if the run-time of big loops is later on faster than v8.<p><pre><code> $ time ./higgs --e "var x = 4; x = x + 5; print(x)"
9
real 0m1.191s
</code></pre>
e.g. my own little jitted language which compiles also to C like asm with tagged data, but with inner-loop type-checks, does it in<p><pre><code> $ time bin/potion -e'x = 4, x = x + 5, x print'
9
real 0m0.005s
</code></pre>
so I don't buy the compiler overhead yet. type checks are not <i>that</i> slow.<p><pre><code> $ time ./perl6-p -e'my $x=4; $x=$x+5; print $x'
9
real 0m0.818s
$ time ./perl6-m -e'my $x=4; $x=$x+5; print $x'
9
real 0m0.614s
</code></pre>
and uncompiled:<p><pre><code> $ time perl -e'my $x=4; $x=$x+5; print $x'
9
real 0m0.010s</code></pre>