Comment by kibwen

I would simply find pleasure in being able to understand basically every level of the stack. For a RISC architecture, it's not too hard to get a grasp on how it works. Likewise for a simple-enough programming language. The problem(?) is that in between these two is an opaque black box--the optimization backend, which I feel I have no hope of understanding. So instead I wonder if it's possible to have a "safe" (safer than C) and "high-level" (more abstractive than C) language that is still useful and semi-performant, and I'm wondering how much ergonomics would need to be sacrificed to get there. It's a thought experiment.