Having the CLI self-contained and easy to cross-compile is a huge improvement, as is the binary size (from what I've seen, wrapped Node binaries are huge). Also

Having the CLI self-contained and easy to cross-compile is a huge improvement, as is the binary size (from what I've seen, wrapped Node binaries are huge). Also, a CLI tool should have low latency and no matter how good your engine is, an interpreter will have much higher startup latency than a proper binary.