LLVM is an extraordinary project. It has enabled a Cambrian explosion of new, interesting and fast languages.
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TIL Advent of Code and Project Euler will deliberately look for puzzles where the naive solution is worse than quadratic.
This ensures that people can solve them with any programming language. You don't want fast languages to be able to use the naive solution.
Blogging about my programming language project: choosing the basic syntax!
https://www.garden-lang.org/blog/syntax.html
Bril is a cute intermediate language for teaching (think simplified LLVM IR): https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~asampson/blog/bril.html
The idea of providing a standard JSON format to help students write basic passes is really elegant.