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+a loose collection of goals and ideas for this as-yet-unnamed language
+
+* fast compilation
+  + grammar must be very easy to parse
+  + more important than high performance
+  + more important than minor ergonomic sacrifices
+  + possibly built-in hot code reloading somewhere down the line
+  + in general:
+    - the most important thing for coding to be fun is a tight feedback loop
+
+* very small, self-contained executables
+  + hello world should ideally be on the order of a couple kilobytes
+  + only functions which get referenced from main (and so on recursively)
+    get any code generated, even for the stdlib
+  + favor size over performance where reasonable
+
+* explicit
+  + procedures that allocate should have an arena parameter
+  + no operator overloading, but builtin vector/matrix types (eventually)
+
+* aesthetically minimalist
+  + not too many keywords or features
+  + no semicolons
+  + no significant whitespace
+  + no parentheses around conditions
+  + type inference wherever possible
+
+* more modern type system than c
+  + distinction between pointers and arrays
+  + slice types (ptr, len)
+    - strings are slices, like rust &str or c++ str_view
+  + dynamic arrays (ptr, len, cap)
+    - manipulation of dynamic arrays is handled by normal functions
+  + type-safe generics
+  + parametric polymorphism (at compile time)
+  + built-in types for vector and matrix math
+  + scalar types have explicit bit sizes
+    - u8, i32, u64, f32, f64
+  + bit set support!
+  + type inference
+    - let x = y
+    - can do like .ENUM_NAME when expecting an enum value, even though
+      otherwise it's `let x = EnumType.ENUM_NAME`
+
+* c interop
+  + ability to specify different calling conventions on:
+    - functions imported from outside
+    - functions exported
+
+* types and procedures in any order
+  + this goal can be thrown out if it turns out to slow down the compiler
+    - but finding these first allows to hand all procedures to a thread pool
+      for parsing and optimization
+  + removes the need for function prototypes, opaque structs, etc.
+  + like in odin, all files in a directory are compiled together and have
+    the same toplevel scope; to isolate things in a package, put them in
+    a different directory
+
+* portable
+  + should be as easy as possible (like that's saying much...) to port to new platforms
+  + at minimum support amd64 and wasm
+  + consider having a version of the compiler which uses LLVM for release builds