> Performance isn't all that matters, especially once you have an established codebase and ecosystem.

And this is no small part of why Java and JS have frequently been pushing VM performance forward — there’s enough code people very much care about continuing to work on performance. (Though the two care about different things mostly: Java cares much more about long-term performance, and JS cares much more about short-term performance.)

It doesn’t hurt they’re both languages which are relatively static compared with e.g. Python, either.