Some of those lessons have most definitely been used to improve the reference implementation. It's not remarkably slow as long as you compare apples to apples,

Some of those lessons have most definitely been used to improve the reference implementation. It's not remarkably slow as long as you compare apples to apples, that is non-jitted vm-interpreters. Jits pay a steep complexity- (and hence maintenance) price for their performance that should be taken into account when comparing. Designing a significantly faster interpreter with comparable features is non-trivial from my experience [0]. https://gitlab.com/sifoo/snigl https://gitlab.com/sifoo/snigl