> JavaScript has proven that any language can be made fast given enough money and brains,
Yeah but commercial Smalltalk proved that a long time before JS did. (Heck, back when it was maintained, the fastest Ruby implementation was built on top of a commercial Smalltalk system, which makes sense given they have a reasonably similar model.)
The hard part is that “enough money“ is...not a given, especially for noncommercial projects. JS got it because Google decided JavaScript speed was integral to it's business of getting the web to replace local apps. Microsoft recently developed sufficient interest in Python to throw some money at it.
Google wasn’t alone in optimizing JS, it actually came late, Safari and Firefox were already competing and improving their runtime speeds, though V8 did doubled down on the bet of a fast JS machine.
The question is why there isn’t enough money, given that there obviously is a lot of interest from big players.
> The question is why there isn’t enough money, given that there obviously is a lot of interest from big players.
I'd argue that there wasn't actually much interest until recently, and that's because it is only recently that interest in the CPython ecosystem has intersected with interest in speed that has money behind it, because of the sudden broad relevance to commercial business of the Python scientific stack for data science.
Both Unladen Swallow and IronPython were driven by interest in Python as a scripting language in contexts detached from, or at least not necessarily attached to, the existing CPython ecosystem.
Yeah but commercial Smalltalk proved that a long time before JS did. (Heck, back when it was maintained, the fastest Ruby implementation was built on top of a commercial Smalltalk system, which makes sense given they have a reasonably similar model.)
The hard part is that “enough money“ is...not a given, especially for noncommercial projects. JS got it because Google decided JavaScript speed was integral to it's business of getting the web to replace local apps. Microsoft recently developed sufficient interest in Python to throw some money at it.