Caterpillar

I have one last thought on the topic of developer experience versus performance. While the focus on developer experience probably means that Caterpillar is not going to be the best language to get that last bit of speed out of an algorithm, I don't think it's going to make Caterpillar programs slow in general.

In fact, the whole point of a good developer experience is to make the process of software development more pleasant, and thus more productive. Better productivity can mean you have time left to optimize.

Also, to improve developer experience, I would like to provide tools to help the developer understand their program better. Including its performance characteristics. All that could lead to a language that is quite fast in general, simply because developers have the tools and the spare resources to make it so. Even if it can't quite compete with Rust or C in peak performance.