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> for all practical purposes, that would have meant C++, and if that had been a hard requirement, the app would never have shipped at all.

This is a really good point. Slow software certainly has its place. Not everything needs to be as optimized as possible. I don't think that the loss of speculative execution would put us back so far in terms of performance that it would hurt slower languages like java or python, but I think it might encourage putting more effort into optimization and probably create more interest in lower level languages. It might even lead to new creative approaches to speeding things up. That said, I'd really rather processors stay fast if they can do it while still being secure.