[alexmchale]

It's an interesting theory, but ultimately irrelevant. The thing is that there are SO MANY people working right now to make JavaScript incredibly fast. It's not hard to imagine a future where JavaScript is the fastest reasonable way to write software -- simply because it's the language that has the most R&D going for it.

Did I say future? Oh, hello NodeJS.

I don't envision that we'll be writing JavaScript itself forever -- but rather a super-syntax on top of it that compiles down to JS. CoffeeScript is the first generation of this kind of programming language.

I do, however, believe that for the foreseeable future, JavaScript will become the lingua franca of day-to-day programming.

[silentbicycle]

And yet, for all the resources being thrown at improving Javascript, LuaJIT is still significantly faster. Oh, and it was written by one person.

The design of Javascript itself limits performance in various ways, unfortunately. See this discussion between Mike Pall (of LuaJIT) and Brendan Eich: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3851#comment-57671.