Node builds on top of V8, Chromium’s JS engine, which has JIT, which allows for some optimizations that aren’t as easy or obvious in a simple bytecode interpreter.
That’s exactly what I argue: the CPython developers choose not to spend time on a JIT (quite possibly because they didn’t have the resources to build a good one)
Someone|2 years ago
PyPy shows Python could have had a JIT (https://www.pypy.org/)