The important difference is memory. It's generally possible to trade space for speed in a JIT and accelerate anything. SBCL is lisp with a JIT. It's as fast as Java - it's as fat as Java (to within 5x either way). Lua is both small and fast, and is more or less on its own as an interpreted language in that category. (Forth is smaller and faster, but forth is about as low level as macro assembler.)