D

[bearophile]

Dave:
>It seems that bearophile basically wants a GP / systems language and tools that are nearly as productive as the likes of Python but can also produce blazingly fast code.<

The things I like can't be summarized in few lines, but one of the things I like more is the following.

Developing ShedSkin (that translates implicitly statically typed Python programs ==> C++) I have seen that it can exist a language that at the same time has a short and very handy syntax and produces very fast programs. The "good" thing is that it doesn't require big inventions, all the necessary parts exists already, to it's not a revolution (some people like revolutions, so this isn't for them).
Languages like Genie, Delight, ShedSkin, Vala, Boo, Cython, Rpython, etc (and OcaML too, probably), go in this direction. The D language too (with the right libraries) can become almost handy.

The last two posts here show examples of what I mean:
http://leonardo-m.livejournal.com/72504.html
http://leonardo-m.livejournal.com/72754.html

In both situations a ShedSkin program is both shorter/cleaner and quite faster than the D ones (the speed increase generally comes from GCC optimizing better than DMD).

Bye,
bearophile