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You're missing 4) piggybacking on existing ecosystems. E.g. Scala, Clojure, F#.

In Nimrod it's easy to piggyback on C, which has the most extensive ecosystem of all languages.

But C's ecosystem is so extensive that everybody can piggyback on it (with varying levels of ceremony).

See CPython, Haskell, C++....

This might already exist, but if Nimrod could piggy back on Javascript (Node), Python and Ruby for libraries this would be huge. Native glue.

This is what Perl6 with Parrot VM aim for.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parrot_virtual_machine

I don't think that we can really consider Perl 6 and Parrot to be anything but abysmal failures at this point. The people developing and advocating for them have had many years now to product something that's even minimally usable, and we just haven't seen that happen.

Writing traditional compilers and interpreters, or emitting C, or targeting LLVM have all proven to be good ways of getting production-grade programming language implementations created and usable quickly. Messing around with Parrot has never resulted in anything useful.

That was the goal, but Parrot failed to meet that goal and P6 is years away from being usable.

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