Well, there are still ways to break the speed barrier. For instance the main reason I made cached-table was in order to cache the results of parsing the wikitext in Arki (but not keeping them for too long, since that would simply be a waste of memory). This is even arguably the "correct" thing to do and I might not have done it yet if Arc hadn't been so slow ^^.
"When I was a noob, I talked like a noob, I thought like a noob, I reasoned like a noob. When I became a hacker, I put noobish things behind me. Now we see but a poor implementation as in an alpha; then we shall see code to code. Now I code in part; then I shall code in full, even as I am full of code. Now these three remain: hubris, impatience, laziness. But the greatest of these is laziness."
Yes, you can always optimize your Arc code to mitigate the problem. My point still stands though. If we want to be able to use Arc in production situations, we will eventually crave an industrial-strength Arc compiler.
This becomes even more obvious if you take seriously the notion of "A Hundred-Year Language".
