It is indeed a really nice language. My biggest irritation with it was that it can't parse C headers, so even though you save programming time vs C++ due to its

It is indeed a really nice language. My biggest irritation with it was that it can't parse C headers, so even though you save programming time vs C++ due to its higher level of abstraction and flexibility, you lose a lot of that time redeclaring C prototypes and/or fighting with SWIG. Also, at the time I was using it, there were 3 main compiler implementations, which were not entirely compatible with each other, and the dynamic linking story was poor. EDIT: Also at the time I was using it (about a year ago), the package manager was very buggy and inflexible. It assumed that each package would output exactly one library or one binary.