I'm glad you emphasized potential and mentioned reality. One other aspect that has become increasingly important is power consumption and heat. Huge data cente

I'm glad you emphasized potential and mentioned reality. One other aspect that has become increasingly important is power consumption and heat. Huge data centers now have to worry about enormous electricity consumption and keeping all the equipment cool. JIT code must do more work to compile (and recompile to optimize) on the fly which means more power and more heat. On the consumer end, Android just switched to Ahead of Time compilation instead of JIT because its JIT performance wasn't that good and it required more power thus sucking battery life.