Nim community has historically been using IRC, but more and more people wanted a simpler way and started using Discord - we have a Discord - IRC bridge so people from both services can talk with each other seamlessly.
Love your Scattered Faith song (even more than Galaxy Collapse). Sad that it doesn't have a ranked beatmap in osu!, but I still listen to it at least once a day :)
This is in fact possible, but you'd need an IR, e.g. see PyPy (it's written in RPython - restricted subset of Python which is *still* valid Python), it translates itself to C and then compiles to a native binary.