Dynamic languages were not very well served until invokedynamic came about.
If you have a careful look at the Java bytecode, every non virtual function call is resolved at compile time. However, for dynamic languages, function resolution is at run time. And at the moment, it can only be done via reflection, and not amenable to JIT optimizations. However, this is all changing, and if Java could shed some of their static classes (which affect start up time), it has a good chance going forward.
Comments
Dynamic languages were not very well served until invokedynamic came about.
If you have a careful look at the Java bytecode, every non virtual function call is resolved at compile time. However, for dynamic languages, function resolution is at run time. And at the moment, it can only be done via reflection, and not amenable to JIT optimizations. However, this is all changing, and if Java could shed some of their static classes (which affect start up time), it has a good chance going forward.