> 1. Lack of Parallelism: Yes, this is already a complete show stopper. 

Why can't you just fork off enough processes to cover each core?

> 5. Strings: pushing unicode throughout a general purpose language is a 
> mistake, IMHO. This is why languages like Java and C# are so slow.

I wrote an entire wiki in OCaml, it's UTF-8 clean throughout and
demonstrably handles German, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean and
Chinese (http://www.ocaml-tutorial.org/).  I wrote another Japanese
website in OCaml.  To do it, I just treated strings as UTF-8.  The
only UTF-8-specific code in the whole thing was tiny, I think a
UTF-8-sensitive string truncation function, and a little bit of
collation (mostly handled by the database, but could easily have been
done using Camomile).  My conclusion: UTF-8 is easy.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat