For a TUI agent, runtime performance is not the bottleneck, not by far. Hackability is the USP. Pi has extensions hotreloading which comes almost for free with jiti. The fact that the source is the shipped artifact (unlike Go/Rust) also helps the agent seeing its own code and the ability to write and load its own extensions based on that. A fact that OpenClaw’s success is in part based on IMO.

I can’t find the tweet from Mario (the author), but he prefers the Typescript/npm ecosystem for non-performance critical systems because it hits a sweet spot for him. I admire his work and he’s a real polyglot, so I tend to think he has done his homework. You’ll find pi memory usage quite low btw.