No, they're very far away from each other on the dynamism scale. There is absolutely no point in trying to compile JavaScript statically, but yet it works very well for Common Lisp. The opposite is also true, smart tracing JITs won't do much for Common Lisp, but shine for JavaScript.

I was just adding on that JavaScript is another example of a dynamic language that is compiled (using JIT in this case) rather than strictly interpreted such as the MRI implementation of Ruby.

Since both this and my parent post on JavaScript being compiled were downvoted without comment I can only make the assumption this is because someone came along who believes this is not the case.

So first I will link out to this StackExchange doc that does a pretty good job of describing this.

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/138521/is-jav...

The JavaScript specification says nothing about the language being interpreted or compiled. Today; most current versions of major browsers use a just in time compiler to handle JavaScript. V8 (Chrome & Nodejs), SpiderMonkey (Firefox), Chakra (InternetExplorer), Carakan (Opera), JavaScriptCore(Webkit/Safari)

For more information take a look at the Wiki entry for EcmaScript engines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ECMAScript_engines

Could you elaborate on this point?

The biggest gain of the tracing JITs is elimination of dynamic dispatch. CL does not use it to an extend comparable to JavaScript, Python or Smalltalk.

That depends largely on the implementation and libraries. Some make extensive use of CLOS in I/O for example.