Are you intentionally invoking Godwin's law because you know your argument is untenable?
> PyPy is a thing, and it works just fine, you know
I like PyPy. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good. Maybe you should recommend that in the first place next time.
> But it's IMPOSSIBLE to implement a bash JIT compiler [...] to fork "bc"
Never say never. Before V8, everyone thought JavaScript had to be as slow as Python too. Now we have PyPy and LuaJIT, which I would've thought were impossible.
> And no, integrating "bc" into bash isn't a valid solution, or they would have done it ages ago
You seem really hung up on "bc". You do realize that "echo" wasn't always a builtin, and that they added it for performance reasons, right? If anyone cared enough, they could add "bc" as a builtin. Hell, the expression evaluator for integers is well on it's way. You're right that probably nobody cares enough to build in "bc", but I wouldn't be surprised to see a triple paren or square bracket math interpreter with floating point support in bash someday. Heh, maybe they'll even add complex numbers. And a bash JIT is exactly the kind of thing some grad student would do for the absurdity of it all.