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".
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".