This looks really lovely, I look forward to following the maturation of Ante in the future. I've often thought that the niche of a general purpose low-level FP language was a promising space. The only other langs that fit in there are ATS[1], which is notoriously complex/difficult-to-learn, and Futhark[2], which is more GPGPU/scientific-computing specific.

We've got Rust, which is essentially a C-style lang that steals all kinds of goodies from the ML family; it's nice to see Ante as a kind of inverse to this: i.e. an ML style lang that borrows some of the nice bits from traditional imperative langs (and hopefully maintains their performance characteristics).

Looking through the language tour there already seem to be a plethora of very sensible/ergonomic design decisions here. The 'loop' and 'recur' keywords are a great feature, making a nice little functional nod towards while loops. As a long-time Haskell user the explicit currying initially turned me off, but after seeing a couple examples I can see how it's actually a very reasonable solution, and moreover the ability to curry out of order is really nice instead of having to use 'flip' or similar combinators (as a side note, the explicit currying reminds me a bit of APL's α and ω arguments in dfns, a feature I'd love to see pop up more). The paired tuples also seem like they'd be a pleasure to use; certainly a bit more flexible than tuples in other ML style langs. Making '.' the pipeline operator is also a smart bit of syntax, and I can see it being very accessible to OO programmers in that it looks (and acts) like the method chaining they're familiar with. Refinement Types seem like a good alternative to full on dependent typing (ATS has an analogous (and more general) proof system for ensuring things like array indices are valid (an essential feature in a low level FP lang), but it involves threading those proofs through your program which seems much more clunky than what's presented here).

Overall I'm really excited to see where Ante goes, it seems like a very pragmatic functional language, something the world definitely needs more of...

[1]: http://www.ats-lang.org/Home.html

[2]: https://futhark-lang.org/

EDIT: In regards to low level FP langs there's also Carp, Erik Svedäng's nifty little statically typed Lisp. It's like Scheme with a Rust-y memory model:

https://github.com/carp-lang/Carp