He probably meant the results of compilation: superfast binaries ;)

In that case, what he missed was AOT optimization :)

Many Lisps have had compilation to binaries. But having a binary doesn't imply being faster than an interpreted language.

Theoretically, a JIT optimization can end up with faster code than an AOT optimizer can produce, thanks to runtime profiling.

In fact, I'd be interested in seeing benchmarks, which Crystal is probably not ready to share, but may have conducted: https://github.com/manastech/crystal/blob/master/samples/fan...

Edit: this[0] seems to indicate that the optimizations are in the same ballpark as Go and D, which is really impressive.

[0]: https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks

> Edit: this[0] seems to indicate that the optimizations are in the same ballpark as Go and D, which is really impressive.

not sure about D, but Go is known to have very little in the way of optimisation, that's a big factor in its speedy compilation.