Goose is a systems language with no heap, and its author showed up to answer questions

A language where there is no heap

Goose is a memory-safe systems language with C-like syntax. Memory is freed when its scope ends. References into a growing array stay valid, the compiler infers what each reference is rooted in and rejects ones that could outlive owners, and output is a single C file. The repository reports a geometric mean of about 3.5x the speed of idiomatic C++ and 1.1x that of the best safe Rust, with about 1.9x less peak memory, over 16 of its own benchmarks. Documented costs: no closures or function pointers, and variable-size arrays iterate but do not index. The whole-program compiler is about 30,000 lines of C++, under Apache 2.0.

The author answers

Aardappel, who says he made the language, opened with an AMA. The first hard question was about JSON.

"How is memory for JSON allocated on stack? It can be from 1K to 1M - depending on the file..." — pulse7

Michael Malis, co-creator of pgrust, asked how a hash table of randomly inserted and deleted strings would work with a fixed number of stacks. And the classification question:

"is it a performance first or safety first language. If it is the former it occupies the same crowded niche as C++ and its many cousins and will have a hard time." — weinzierl, a Rust programmer

The claims are the author's own and the thread shows the data-structure question was still open, so treat the benchmark ratios as hypotheses until someone ports a workload with dynamic keys.