If the plan was to have something nice performing on the XO-1 then I would have gone with something like FreePascal, It existed, The compiler was fast, frien

If the plan was to have something nice performing on the XO-1 then I would have gone with something like FreePascal, It existed, The compiler was fast, friendly to newcomers, and the final code is much faster than anything Interpreted. JIT gets you speed but at the cost of memory. Remember it only had 256Meg. Similarly, Having used Cairo on the XO, I saw no evidence of hardware acceleration, and was significantly slower than other software renderer I tried. I used Imlib2 which was massively faster. I would have preferred a much simpler graphics library that was specifically designed to support the 2d Acceleration that the geode provided. Fewer features but everything fast. I played the original StarCraft on a machine significantly less powerful than the XO-1. It managed a smoother GUI with Sci-fi looking transparent panels sliding in. The power was there but abstraction threw it all away.