[achierius]

You don't need a bytecode interpreter to not have UB defined in your language. E.g. instead of unchecked addition / array access, do checked addition / bounds checked access. There are even efforts to make this the case with C: https://github.com/pizlonator/llvm-project-deluge/blob/delug... achieves a ~50% overhead, far far better than Python.

And even among languages that do have a full virtual machine, Python is slow. Slower than JS, slower than Lisp, slower than Haskell by far.

[pfdietz]

Common Lisp and Scheme are typically compiled ahead of time right down to machine code. And isn't Haskell also?

There is a Common Lisp implementation that compiles to bytecode, CLISP. And there are Common Lisp implementations that compile (transpile?) to C.