&gt; There&#x27;s a lot of low-hanging performance fruit in programming language design.<p>Indeed but there is also huge scope for applying known techniques to existing languages, PHP7 for example is twice as fast as 5.6 (in the real world, I&#x27;ve seen this) with about half the memory usage.<p>The interesting thing is that anyone using PHP who goes to 7 gets that performance upgrade at essentially zero-cost.