I think it's very easy to vastly underestimate how much brainpower went into making JS fast. It's looks like a very slow language on the tin, with it's interpre

I think it's very easy to vastly underestimate how much brainpower went into making JS fast. It's looks like a very slow language on the tin, with it's interpreter, associative objects and overall structure, but, given how much people use it, browsers spent a lot of money making it seriously fast. It's a bit like x86: Other concepts like ARM, RISC and Itanium seem like they should be a lot faster than the outdated, massively retrofitted house of cards that is x86, but with billions of dollars invested into getting it fast, it's really hard to beat it with a different design at a lower budget.