OMG languages are a PITA

I'm revisiting the various implementations of Joy in the Thun project and
man, oh, man, does each have it's own particular sort of pain.

The C code is working, I think, but I have no actual confidence in it.
For one thing, how will GC and GMP work in the presence of
setjmp/longjmp?  I don't know.  Are you just a few Joy errors away from
crashing the interpreter in obscure ways?  Maybe.  I'm not even sure that
I'm using GC and GMP together correctly.

I had a problem where, ... you know what, I'm not going to explain it,
just link to the SO where I found the answer:

=> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12734161/how-to-use-boehm-garbage-collector-in-ubuntu-12-04

So, yeah, GCC just changed some stuff and things broke (for me.)  If it
wasn't for stackoverflow and the internet would I have had any hope of
figuring out what was going on?  This has been stable for years, or even
decades, and I didn't get the memo when it changed.  I used to know wtf
I was doing, but because of constant change my knowledge "rots" even when
I'm not actually forgetting things.

Yuch.

I'd like to use OCaml or Haskell (or even F#) but they have such baggage
to set up and use.  OCaml in particular was a steep and frustrating
learning curve.

Common Lisp would be the thing to use?

I want a very simple ML-ish language with just a little bit of
Lisp-ish-ness, that compiles to...?  Simple C?  I'll be damned if I'm
going to write assembly.  I like it but it's a huge side quest.

maybe a Joy compiler to C in Prolog?  I've got a little bit of a start on
compiling to Python (which has some syntax and semantics which make
certain things easier to do.)

Around and around I go, languages and runtimes, back and forth.  Go?
Fucking Java?  (The JVM is sick yo.  Seriously.  They have been polishing
that turd so long and so well that it's been lacquered into something
pretty tight and useful.)

Scheme, Lisp, GLam Toolkit? (Smalltalk), etc.

I'd love to have an Erlang backend, but whoa that's a whole kettle of
hard-to-debug fish?  Elixir, Gleam, etc.

Don't get me started on Javascript.

Bleah.

Maybe the answer is to write Joy-in-Factor and just lean on Slava
Pestov's fine work?  I think I have as much chance of learning the
internals of that system as any of the others, and it would reward the
effort I think.  (He's very good.)