Lisp and Haskell use obligate GC, which is a non-starter in any sort of low-level or latency-sensitive programming. Haskell uses laziness, which makes memory al

Lisp and Haskell use obligate GC, which is a non-starter in any sort of low-level or latency-sensitive programming. Haskell uses laziness, which makes memory allocations very hard to reason about. Lisp uses dynamic typing, which means you have to dispatch on literally every single variable access... There are lots of these hidden overheads - you can write a kernel in a higher-level language than C (see Redox as an example) but it really can't be the usual sort of quick-and-dirty application-programming oriented "higher-level language"