I am not a compiler/JIT expert by any stretch, but I have never heard of a strong technical reason why python could not be as fast as JS on V8 or compiled code

I am not a compiler/JIT expert by any stretch, but I have never heard of a strong technical reason why python could not be as fast as JS on V8 or compiled code produced by LISP compilers. But there are strong factors against it: * the reference implementation is maintained by a team of contributors, very few people are paid full time to work on cpython. State of the art JIT is hard to come by when you can only afford working a few hours / week. * contrary to JS, python had a huge set of packages available for a very long time, making "minor" language breaks unworkable. * also contrary to JS, python had from the start a strong story to interoperate w/ the C ABI, which tightened a large subset of python libraries with the details of cpython implementation. Because of its "niche", JS never really had that problem. If you remove libraries w/ large C extensions, you remove a lot of what make python popular today (e.g. scientific usage is now the 2nd largest area of application of python after web development, before automation, testing, etc... which used to be where python shined).