> I don’t think that JavaScript is inherently slow
It is.
Brilliant engineers have spent decades making it faster than you might expect, subject to many caveats, and after the JIT has had plenty of time to warm up, and if you're careful to write your code in such a way that it doesn't fall off the JITs optimization paths, etc.
Meanwhile, any typical statically typed language with a rudimentary ahead of time compiler will generally be faster than a JS VM will ever approach. And you don't have to wait for the JIT to warm up.
There are a lot of good things about dynamically typed languages, but if you're writing a large program that must startup quickly and where performance is critical, I think the right answer is a sound typed language.
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