I'm thinking about the problem, so if there is a question, it would be "what NOW?"

Should I bother with byte codes? What's a useful minimal set of operations? In other words, not just a bare Turing machine. In what sense could it be a replacement for XS? Is a forth-like stack machine going to create headaches later?

Most importantly, am I wasting people's time by asking?

I'm trying to come up with my own answers, and learn by trying. My first attempt used the Lua ops in an interpreter prototype. Of course all my prototyping is likely going to start with Perl, because I like it.

But I'm also thinking about Perl's functions, and what it would take to "write" them in a lower level opcode set, rather than C.