I think the bigger problem is a language design one. Scripting languages are often easier to use than more performant ones because they make a lot of choices fo

I think the bigger problem is a language design one. Scripting languages are often easier to use than more performant ones because they make a lot of choices for the developer (automatic allocation and garbage collection, doesn't expose reference versus value, no pointers, everything is a table/object/whatever). A runtime can try to make inferences about how language features are being used in order to speed up execution or reduce memory use, but usually even then things end up being less efficient than if the programmer had to actually make choices about memory allocation, if/when to free things, etc.