Wanted: a language that is similarly easy to work with as JS, has automatic memory management, has similar (or better) performance, and whose code can be embedded in codebases in arbitrary other languages (including C/C++) with minimal integration overhead. 
(Note: *all* of the properties must be satisfied. "Most" properties isn't useful here!)
@balrogboogie Doesn't LuaJIT require basically wiring in a Lua runtime into the 'host' codebase? What I'm thinking of is something that integrates cleanly enough that you could simply hand someone a .so and say "here you go" and it looks like any other C-style library, and similarly 'obvious' integration for other languages.
@balrogboogie (Reason: having to wire up a runtime for using some code in the-language-I'm-looking-for would all but guarantee that nobody would use libraries in said language in any codebase that's written in something different, because it looks like a really big pile of complexity. That's mostly a problem of prejudice, but it's still a problem nevertheless)
@joepie91 ah, gotcha, sorry, I misunderstood what you meant by "embedded in codebases"
@joepie91 unsure what you're thinking of with the last part, but: Dart?
@lnl Bit more of the explanation for that here: https://social.pixie.town/@joepie91/112961479818598968
@joepie91 i've been playing with https://www.roc-lang.org/
i think it meets those requirements, but it's still young.
@owl Thanks, hadn't heard of this one before!
I'm not a fan of the syntax and semantics at first glance (bad experiences with readability of single-paradigm strictly-functional languages...) but it does indeed seem to otherwise match what I'm looking for, so I'll give it a closer look anyway.
@joepie91 swift, maybe? The Linux/windows story isn’t great but aiui it does exist, and I think there’s good tooling for generating C bindings
@Gaelan Yeah, this is kind of the issue I ran into - I looked into it and everything I found was "now start by downloading Xcode, and..."
It seemed interesting in some ways, but I don't know, it doesn't give me much confidence that it'll be a reliable long-term option when you don't want to play in Apple's walled garden.
@joepie91 hmm, luajit sounds close to this, except for maybe "easy to work with"? but that ones pretty subjective.
Apologies if you've already considered and rejected this one, it's the closest I can think of to fulfilling all these