Were your languages very high-level? If so, that kinda rhymes with my experience on past projects. The more expressive the language, the easier it is for programs to create combinatorial explosions that slow everything down if compiled naively.
The language is high-level but I wouldn't necessarily say very high level. But because I'm trying to spin up language features at runtime (like a lot of Forth does), there are a few layers on top of the language primitives.
I wish there was some framework for me to add optimizations as I go along, especially if there could be some speed gauranttee. Though in my case, I'd like to also not lose the relation to the original source (like C does when values are optimized out).
