For a moment you had me wondering if there would be a way to use Hy and google's new Grumpy together, and then I dismissed the idea as probably utter madness. For a long time I've been pining for a Clojure-like lisp that can compile to machine code.

Why wouldn't it work?

I'm not certain that it wouldn't work, but it would have multiple compile steps: Hy => Python => Go => Native, which would either cause a lot of pain or make nigh impossible many of the advantages of using a lisp, like connecting a repl to a running process and being able to evaluate and rewrite code from there.

You could prototype in the Hy REPL then compile after.

IIRC it's sexp to python AST.

There's also Pixie, a python lisp to LLVM system, that was specifically made for high performance.

Is it this? https://github.com/pixie-lang/pixie

It seems so.. which makes my LLVM mention false. There's a talk by the author online http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AjhFZVfB9c

worth it