I like dynamic languages too. But I don't like the idea of "optimization", and I would be super interested in a dynamic language that didn't attempt to divorce performance from correctness. The worst part about jumping through insane hoops to enchant the optimizer is that it can all go wrong with the tiniest change--a flag here, a different usage pattern there, a new version, etc., and suddenly your program doesn't do what you need it to, as though an operation taking 1000x longer is just a matter of degree.
At the same time, no one wants their code to run 100x slower than it would in any typical statically typed language. Unoptimized dynamic languages are sloooooow.
Rpython and Graal (and what else?) provide JIT-for-free (or at least cheap).
Of course, this really only works for code that is (a) statically polymorphic but dynamically monomorphic, and (b) has hot loops, but qualitatively that conjunction does seem like it ought to cover a lot of low-hanging fruit.
There aren't many people looking at these JITs at the moment. Stefan Marr[1]'s group[2] is, I believe, the where most of the research is currently done. A recent paper[3] compares performance of interpreters in RPython and Graal. Their baseline performance is Java, and they achieve performance close to V8, which itself is about 2x slower than Java.
My summary is you can write fast interpreters + get JIT for free, but fast JIT for dynamic languages still means 2x slower than JIT for statically typed languages (and Java definitely leaves some performance on the table due to how it represents data).
