You might find running across four cores is actually faster than "compiling into a single program"
Even if we don't assume we have such astounding transformations, I think you're vastly overestimating the power of multithreading in this example. There's very little for each core to do, especially the final step (which is getting a whopping 5 lines to process).
All that being said, I'm not sure that, if I wanted highly parallel text processing OR deeply clever compiler-style optimizations, I'd start from "existing Unix utilities and their associated cruft".
Starting from the Unix utilites is simply because I'm so used to them.
I can assure you, however, that anyone who was under the impression that my system was actually Unix would be in for a nasty surprise :->
My system would be, shall we say, not POSIX compliant.
My system would take the things I like about Unix, such as being command-line centric and having utilities focused on being good at small individual tasks and using pipes to glue them together seemingly (but actually as mentioned each pipeline is compiled to an optimized program when run), and the filesystem would remain essential and hierarchical.
I would separate Operating System binary data, Operating System config files, Application binary data, Application config files, User config files, User downloaded data and User created data STRICTLY!
Also like I mentioned, to have structured binary data instead of text. This would lead to commands which are named like in POSIX but which operate a bit differently with regards to the arguments they take.
Probably a lot of other things as well that I've been thinking about but which escapes me at the moment.
But yeah, all of that remains a dream because it would involve more work than I have time for :(
Only if `/var/log/somefile` is a regular file and isn't opened for writing by any other process. Or your "smart enough compiler" doesn't care about doing the same thing.