I have no experience building languages, but as someone who has to build relatively performant code and longs for a clean, DRY language, I completely agree with

I have no experience building languages, but as someone who has to build relatively performant code and longs for a clean, DRY language, I completely agree with you about picking a target language that closely fits the semantics. Rolling out your own libraries and runtime seems like a gargantuan endeavor too likely to fail, and portability (not to mention performance) will likely suffer. I think the CoffeeScript approach is the way to go: syntactic sugar that generates human readable code. I'd be happy to have an elegant language that would compile to C++ simply adding some DRYness and elegance (for example not having to write headers), but without trading it for performance/portability (for example without abstracting pointers or new/delete). I would happily use a subset of C++ if required. This in C++: // in file MyClass.h ////////////// class MyClass: public ParentClass { public: int myInt, myInt2; float myFloat; Arr *myArr; MyClass() { } MyClass(); void doStuff(); }; //in file MyClass.cpp ////////////// #include "MyClass.h" MyClass::MyClass() { self->doStuff(); int poop = 321654987; myInt = 112233 * poop; { // new scope here } } void MyClass::doStuff() { int myNum = 123; poop *= myNum; } Could relatively easily be generated from this syntactic sugar: class MyClass < ParentClass int myInt, myInt2 float myFloat Arr *myArr void initialize(args) self.doStuff() int poop = 321654987 myInt = 112233 * poop // new scope here void doStuff() myNum := 123; poop *= myNum; And wouldn't generating such readable code bypass the need for a debugger?