I hear your basic points, and this is a tangent on a tangent, but: Rakudo, the existing implementation of standard Perl 6, is a compiler. (I wouldn't be surpr

I hear your basic points, and this is a tangent on a tangent, but: Rakudo, the existing implementation of standard Perl 6, is a compiler. (I wouldn't be surprised if the code currently generated by Rakudo for this algorithm is far slower than the code generated by rustc but that isn't because it isn't a compiler.)