Javascript may not have an official bytecode, but is it not also based on the same concept of using dictionaries to dispatch code and slow as a result? I certainly had always filed it away as "about as fast as python" in my head. Why else would it rely on evented i/o?
You are correct, but they have (1) all of the money in the world as the fundamental programming language of the Internet and as a result (2) they have a state of the art tiered JIT for dynamic languages. The blood of countless PhD students flows through v8. I don't know if python will get the same treatment.
