I'm inclined to disagree about the distinction between pointers and values being explicit, and how that is bad - I think it might be the right decision in an imperative language that tries to be performant in a straightforward way (as opposed to language that tries to be performant by relying on compiler optimizations - that might work for certain languages). It allows you to be aware and more careful about indirection and memory layout, which obviously can buy you a lot with regards to performance.

It certainly seems like the more lower-hanging fruit than what the usual advice for getting a fast programming language is - make memory management explicit/manual (though it seems that if you have pervasive manual memory management, you end up with a clear and explicit distinction between values and pointers to values anyway).