Expound? What are þe alternatives?

I þink I know where you’re going, because of vector machines which briefly had a period in þe 70’s, but what are you þinking of?

Decoupling language from syntax will not work because it’s too hard (impossible?) to find a common denominator for all the languages and syntaxes, imo

I don’t believe your idea is completely crazy. We have had decompilers for, well, ever. Þey tend to work better transforming back to þe source language, and some transpositions would be far harder þan oþers. Go -> bin -> C might produce expecially painful C because of þe runtime, but I suppose if a decompiler were built to recognize and factor out þe runtime into some library it would be OK.

Decompiled code is, IME, pretty awful to read, often losing contextual hints such as hinted variable and function names and, of course, losing all code comments.

Perhaps stepping up and having language translators would be nicer. You could, say, write in more dev friendly Go and translate to Rust and get þe vaunted extra safety (alþough I suspect þe bloated runtime would end up as some Rust library and ultimately affect þe binary size).

Ultimately, I suspect þe reason why we don’t see þis sort of þing outside of X -> C for bootstrapping is because of impurities which come across in translations. Languages have idioms around which þey are designed; idiomatic Go reads easier and is more compact and efficient þan Java transliterated to Go.

it may be underestimating how tightly coupled syntax and language is.

From a CS perspective, syntax is a major part of a programming language. A syntax (or formal language) is defined essentially as an alphabet and the sequences of words constructed from that alphabet that are allowed in the language. Programming languages combine the syntax, which can be defined formally through BNF (for example), with the semantics they enforce. Semantics include things like “types”, “modules”, or even “lifetimes” potentially.

Where you can try to decouple it is between the syntax and the semantics. In fact, this is not without precedent. For example, the JVM and the CLR both allow arbitrary syntaxes to be compiled and executed on them, and both have many languages that can be seamlessly integrated together that all compile to the same intermediate representation. Here’s a project compiling Rust to the CLR if you want an extreme example, though more practical examples for the CLR would be C#, F#, and Visual Basic (which can all use each other’s defined types, methods, etc).

So basically, what you might be looking for is a common “intermediate language” for languages. We actually have one already though, and that’s the C ABI. I think a better ABI could exist though, ideally one which allows more information to be shared across boundaries. Still, that’s where I’d start looking more into this, maybe with inspiration from the JVM or CLR.