That’s what I meant, if JavaScript hadn’t been trapped in the browser and allowed to call C, maybe there wouldn’t have been so much investment in making it fast.

But still, it’s kind of surprising that PHP has a JIT and Python doesn’t (official implementation I mean, not PyPy).

Python has a lot more third-party packages that are written in native code. PHP has few partly because it just isn't used much outside of web dev, and partly because the native bits that might be needed for web devs, like database libraries, are included in the core distro.

Because it has to, there is no other way to make it fast, as typical two language dilemma.