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After much turmoil, I have decided that multimedia support for my language has to be the #1 priority for this project to succeed. It doesn't matter how efficient the language is if it can't encode / decode certain video files.

I have also decided which multimedia framework I am going to use. Again, after much thought and many questions to the Linux community, I have decided that the GStreamer framework is the future. It's where all the development is happening, and it's by far the most supported and used media framework out there today (in Linux).

The MLT framework was very tempting, but it is developing at a much slower rate. It supports less audio / video formats. It supports less languages. Thus, I am not choosing it.

Now, back to the winning language: I am choosing Python! Not because of it's speed (obviously it's quite a slow language compared to C++), but because of the following factors:

• Great support of the Gstreamer framework (#1 on my list)
• Easy to read / brief syntax & less lines of code
  
• Very popular in the Linux community
• All the heavy lifting is done with Gstreamer (written in C) and not Python, so I doubt the speed will be an issue.
  
• Even though it's not thought of as a "GUI" language, it is quite capable. Take a look at an open-source audio mixing program written in Python: Jokosher.