Agreed. Scripted/interpreted languages are, in general, one to two orders of magnitude slower than a compiled language such as C/C++. It's damn difficult to go

Agreed. Scripted/interpreted languages are, in general, one to two orders of magnitude slower than a compiled language such as C/C++. It's damn difficult to go much better than 10x slower due to the nature of an interpreter--even fast opcode-based interpreters. There are some extensions to the GNU C/C++ compilers that can help here, though.