We introduce Hailstorm, a statically typed, pure functional language for systems programming. At its core, Hailstorm is a call by value implementation of simply typed lambda calculus, extended with recursion. The aim is to efficiently map high level features like higher order functions, recursion and parametric polymorphism to resource constrained hardware. One of the notable features of the language is its simple runtime system. Hailstorm bypasses heap allocation through static analysis techniques and compiler optimization passes, aiming to avoid garbage collection and associated timing problems. The purity of the language gives the compiler full freedom to rewrite the program in memory efficient ways. Hailstorm compiles to LLVM.