Introduction

A number of people describe Valhalla recently as being "primarily about performance".  While it is understandable why people might come to that conclusion -- many of the motivations for Valhalla are, in fact, rooted in performance considerations -- this characterization misses something very important.  Yes, performance is an important part of the story -- but so are safety, abstraction, encapsulation, expressiveness, maintainability, and compatible library evolution.

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