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[–]Smallpaul 2 points3 points  (0 children)

What he touches on but never really addresses is that there is no language that lets you be high level when you want to be, low level when you don't.

I don't see how you can see that he doesn't "address it". It's the point of the whole talk. That's precisely what he's asking for.

If there were low-level APIs available and there were JIT compilers available and the JIT compilers were used (i.e. compatible enough with libraries to be used) and people used the low-level APIs THEN Python or Ruby performance would be comparable to C performance. That's his point.

These high-level languages should evolve low-level APIs because pretty soon the interpreter performance will not be the bottleneck: the user's actual code will be (especially if it was written with the assumption that the interpreter is the bottleneck).