[ltratt]

I know myself that I had a high regard for LuaJIT before benchmarking, and an even higher regard for it afterwards. Richards is an oldish benchmark, and none of the subsequent versions (Lua, Python, Converge) is exactly "native", so I'm not sure that any of those languages has an advantage. It's a datapoint, no more, no less. As to which VM would be faster on "large" programs - well, personally I agree with your implication that it's a matter of conjecture, and we'll probably never know because it's hard to write large cross-language benchmarks.

I do, however, think you might be a little harsh on meta-tracing. It's an interesting approach, in no small part because it allows VMs to be written for languages other than Python. LuaJIT can be retargeted too (I've been impressed by Thomas Schilling's work), but I think it would be fair to say that it's harder work than writing a new RPython interpreter. In other words, IMHO, there is plenty of scope for both LuaJIT and RPython/PyPy to co-exist happily alongside each other.