Quickie profiling showed that the majority of Tangent's slowness for the test app was indeed around 1 method (36 seconds of 50 on the slow machine; the method to select the correct method from a group based on runtime type). I added caching to it (since given inputs, the output will be identical) and dropped that from 36 seconds to 0.6 seconds. Tangent is now 20-30 times slower than C# which is acceptable (imo) since it's currently running in a naive-VM with nil optimization during compilation.

[edit: and tonight I re-did escape sequences so that they work. Woo. Over the weekend I'll probably look into writing up some documentation, and investigating a home for the code/docs/faqs/forums/crap so I can let people gouge themselves in tender places with the language. First run at the very least will not be open source; sorry.]