I'd be interested in a direct comparison with similar efforts undertaken by existing frameworks; for example Torch Script[1], which aims to produce a language which shares a syntactic frontend with Python while getting all the goodies that ahead-of-time compilation gives you (symbolic diff, operator fusion, etc).

Seems to me that the primary challenge for any "next-generation" framework or language is getting people to actually use the thing. Sharing a front-end with Python and a backend with PyTorch seems like a good way to bootstrap that.

[1] https://pytorch.org/docs/master/jit.html?highlight=torchscri...