[nostrademons]

Most games nowadays use a two-tiered architecture: they write the graphics, rendering, collision-detection, and other processor-intensive parts as C libraries, and then do the game mechanics, AI, physics, and other highly-changeable parts in an interpreted scripting language. That way, they get the maintenance advantages of a high-level language without paying the speed penalty.

Also, many people don't realize just how much faster computers are now than they were 10 years ago. As part of the prototyping for my startup, I wrote a couple games in JavaScript, which is roughly 1000 times slower than C. They were generally quite playable, except on Firefox/X-windows where an odd Canvas bug seems to be adding a lot of latency without pegging the CPU. I'd still use Flash if I were doing a production game (JavaScript's timing is inconsistent, with occasional long pauses presumably for garbage collection), but as long as you stick to 2D it's quite feasible to do games entirely in interpreted languages.