Really interesting news, and uniquely dismaying to me as someone who is fighting tooth and claw to keep JS language tooling in the JS ecosystem.

My question has to do with Ryan's statement:

> We also considered hybrid approaches where certain components could be written in a native language, while keeping core typechecking algorithms in JavaScript

I've experimented deeply in this area (maybe 15k hours invested in BABLR so far) and what I've found is that it's richly rewarding. Javascript is fast enough for what is needed, and its ability to cache on immutable data can make it lightning fast not through doing more work faster, but by making it possible to do less work. In other words, change the complexity class not the constant factor.

Is this a direction you investigated? What made you decide to try to move sideways instead of forwards?