Comment by MillironX
3 months ago
I immediately thought of Julia as a semi-dynamic language. Julia is a dynamic language, but (as I understand it) the first time a function is called with a specific type signature, that specific method is JIT compiled as static LLVM.
Which is then used for future dispatches on that same signature and gives it very good performance. Julia is dynamic, and definitely beats the 10x slower than C barrier jerf mentioned.
For what I was using it for at the time (~3 years ago when I used it seriously) it offered performance close to the compiled orbital analysis code we had (in more conventional languages, Fortran and C) but with the flexibility for developing models of Python and other dynamic/interactive languages. An excellent tradeoff: very small performance cost for better interactivity and flexibility.