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Ruby hits that sweet spot for me. Have you seen Crystal? Ruby, but native. Amazing stuff.

The big thing that's missing for me is support for operating systems that aren't Linux or macOS. At work, Windows support is a must (I may strongly dislike it, but that's life).

The other blocker was historically the lack of threading, but now that seems to be implemented.

Yes, Crystal is pretty cool. Though I have found that it is hard to compile for different platforms. If you need speed and concurrency, giving jruby a shot is worth a try. It speeds up your code through both being fast and having 'real' concurrency.

What do you think of the reliance on the JVM? I've tended to shy away from using it.

JVM can be kinda neat if you're doing server deployments and might use different languages like Kotlin, Java, Clojure and jRuby, as the deployments are mostly the same and same inspection tools can be used for the runtime.

However, doing CLIs or binaries for whatever reason, then it wouldn't be so neat. Ruby wouldn't either, but GraalVM might be able to provide something good for it in the future as well.

You could always compile Java to straight native code since the early 2000's, just not for free.

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