I agree with your point about multiple JS engines, indeed you can't pick and choose the best results. What I was trying to say is just that the best results we see are an indication of where things are going. But again, I agree, we are not there yet and right now, each user has just one JS engine, and problems on some benchmarks. Static languages have much more consistent performance.
About the last 6 months: Yes, a lot happened during that time, namely FF4's JaegerMonkey and Chrome's Crankshaft. Both are significant improvements.
About typing, yes, in a way that could let this code run faster inside the JVM or Mono. If you can figure out the types, you can generate fast statically typed code for those VMs. However, type analysis can be both static and dynamic, should integrate with the PICs and so forth. So even with that, I don't expect dynamic languages to be able to run very fast on static language VMs.
About the last 6 months: Yes, a lot happened during that time, namely FF4's JaegerMonkey and Chrome's Crankshaft. Both are significant improvements.
About typing, yes, in a way that could let this code run faster inside the JVM or Mono. If you can figure out the types, you can generate fast statically typed code for those VMs. However, type analysis can be both static and dynamic, should integrate with the PICs and so forth. So even with that, I don't expect dynamic languages to be able to run very fast on static language VMs.