Heck, even with these data 12.80s vs 8.60s is not "wreck".
Those are in the same order of magnitude even! Not even 2x the speed. Hardly makes a difference in picking one or the other, all other things being the same.
Now, compare V8 or LuaJit with Python or Ruby -- that would be "wrecking it".
You've missed my point; LuaJIT can be quite a bit faster than v8, despite the amount of money being invested in it being a tiny fraction of what's put into v8. Therefore, we can conclude that v8's speed is not simply a function of money, but that there may be other variables involved, such as "complexity of language".
I'm not attacking v8 here. I'm simply pointing out that there are VMs for interpreted languages which run faster than v8, which isn't to say "v8 is bad", but rather "different languages inherently have different performance profiles".
Those are in the same order of magnitude even! Not even 2x the speed. Hardly makes a difference in picking one or the other, all other things being the same.
Now, compare V8 or LuaJit with Python or Ruby -- that would be "wrecking it".