From what I've seen about Shen, it seems like the idea is to write some kind of layer on top of the host language on which Shen is run, kind of like an interpre

From what I've seen about Shen, it seems like the idea is to write some kind of layer on top of the host language on which Shen is run, kind of like an interpreter, though not quite. Or at least that's the feeling I've got from watching a talk on Shen. Lux, on the other hand, will be compiled directly to the target platforms. There will be a degree of separation (mostly because portability is a #1 concern for me and I don't wan't host semantics to compromise it), but Lux is meant to compile down to host code (bytecode, in the case of the JVM). Also, the type-system is more like Haskell's, whereas Shen has it's own way of doing it (sequent-calculus).