I'm very happy to see continued investment into mutable value semantics. When I was writing Swift, it felt absolutely magical to have most of the guarantees of

I'm very happy to see continued investment into mutable value semantics. When I was writing Swift, it felt absolutely magical to have most of the guarantees of functional programming without the performance penalty and intermittent awkwardness. Val just doubles down on the ideas in Swift and goes so far as to remove references altogether. This is a really interesting space.