Paulo Pinto:
As for the speed of native code produced by JITs for dynamic
languages,
I think Cog(Smalltalk), Self(Smaltalk ended up becoming JVM
Hotspot),
PyPy (Python), V8(JavaScript), LLVM(Julia) prove that you can
get pretty close to C for the majority of use cases that matter
to the common user.
Among V8 developers thee are some ex Self developers.
I think at the moment there aren't enough Julia benchmarks to
allow us to judge its performance well enough.
PyPy is surely not close to C speeds when it JITs Python code
(PyPy developers need to stop using just their few benchmarks and
try to optimize many other programs).
And you miss the best of the bunch, the Lua JIT.
One problem with JITs is that they give you a good performance if
they are well implemented and if the the GC is good. While older
languages produce decent performance even with a simple compiler.
Bye,
bearophile
