The significance of a "10 year lag in performance" has wildly different meanings between the present day and, say, 10 years ago. 2010 (serial) performance on 2

The significance of a "10 year lag in performance" has wildly different meanings between the present day and, say, 10 years ago. 2010 (serial) performance on 2020 hardware would be hardly perceptible. 2000 performance on 2010 would be much more noticeable. 1990 performance on 2000 hardware would be catastrophic. And yet, Java, C#, Erlang, Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl... all of these languages and their VMs are decades old now. And yeah, the languages toward the end of that list ain't exactly speed demons, but the ones toward the front are already commonly used for high-performance applications with pretty dang good success, and even the ones toward the back of the pack are there for other reasons beyond just the VM (global interpreter locks, parsing overhead, things like that). The VM, that is to say, ain't the issue. Hell, things like SPIR-V demonstrate that VMs are perfectly fine even for GPU computation. There's a price, sure, but eliminating that price is about as premature of an optimization at it gets for all but the most constrained of environments. There are almost certainly worse bottlenecks - and those bottlenecks are probably around I/O and memory, knowing most applications (and a bytecode VM often helps here, since the opcodes can be tuned for minimum size, often giving even RISC CPU opcodes a run for their money).