There seem to be two different reasons people want a generic freeze syntax: 1. Making a hashable copy of an arbitrary object 2. Avoiding O(n) rebuilding of literals on every use (a constant for bytecode, as you put it) In both 1 and 2, not only the object but all of its children need to be immutable. For 2, that's the status quo, but for 1 it seems like a bigger problem. There is already a solution of sorts for 1: pickle. It may even be more efficient than a subobject-by-subobject deep freeze since it stores the result contiguously in RAM. On the other hand it can't share storage with already-hashable objects. For the second one, I would rather have an "inline static" syntax (evaluates to the value of an anonymous global variable that is initialized on first use), since it would be more broadly useful, and the disadvantages seem minor. (The disadvantages I see are that it's built per run instead of per compile, it's theoretically mutable (but mutation would be evident at the sole use site), and it may use more heap space depending on how constants are implemented which I don't know.) As for the syntax... well, backticks, obviously...