And yet, none emerges as a general clear choice. I have the feeling this is because python is too dynamic making this a sysiphean effort.
I urge designers of future dynamic languages to study Lua and LuaJIT if you want your language to not inhibit JIT development.
That said, the Pyston guys knew what the problems were (dynamism in C runtime) and were making progress. This was the future of fast Python - JIT experts optimizing the runtime and feeding code and ideas back to CPython.
I think we will look back at this Pyston announcement as the turning point where people gave up on Python speed.
Not anymore than there were in Javascript's design -- which is as, if not more, dynamic.
It's just lack of funding. PyPy managed to get much faster than CPython, but doesn't have the funding or the blessing of being official (Javascript doesn't need it, since there were always multiple implementations).
for x in range(1000):
sum = sum + math.sin(x)
Also, what constructs of Javascript are more dynamic than python? I can only think of "eval" and "with", both of which the JavaScript JIT decline to compile and interpret instead.
Agreed. Also Smalltalk's memory model was a lot easier to optimize than languages like Python and Ruby. (Java inherited some of that.) Not having syntactic sugar makes optimization easier.
In addition, language designers need to make parser tools easy to make and robust.