No I don't know how fast her compiler was. This also isn't a good setup for comparing language performance, since all the test programs were small and there was

No I don't know how fast her compiler was. This also isn't a good setup for comparing language performance, since all the test programs were small and there was no incentive to make your compiler fast. Many groups probably used O(n^2) algorithms in their compiler and differences in algorithm choice would probably add too much noise to get a good performance signal. That aside, speaking off the cuff totally separately from my post, I'm extremely dissatisfied with the performance of current compilers. The fastest compilers written by performance-oriented programmers can be way faster than ones you generally encounter. See luajit and Jonathan Blow's 50k+ loc/second compilers and the kind of things they do for performance. One example of a compiler task it's really difficult to do quickly in a language like Python/Ruby is non-regex parsing, I've written recursive descent parsers in Ruby and compiled languages and the Ruby ones were 1-2 orders of magnitude slower, non-JIT dynamic languages are really bad at tight loops like that.