You seem to be assuming everybody in the world always wants the same things, which is demonstrably false. There were excited communities of people using Lisp in

You seem to be assuming everybody in the world always wants the same things, which is demonstrably false. There were excited communities of people using Lisp in 1962 and Java in 1997. Both were significantly slower than mainstream platforms of the time. There are many platforms today that provide performance, and people who need performance will use them. I can't compete with them. Mu is for people who don't need performance quite so badly, and who are willing to trade performance for other benefits. Also, the word "priority" means relative importance. Too many priorities are equivalent to no priorities. Performance not being a priority just means other aspects are more important, not that performance will be glacial. Indeed, a lot of performance stems from doing less, and I fully expect fewer layers of abstraction to keep Mu quite competitive for many tasks. But that will happen naturally without me needing to push on it.