I'll concede that Python has more nuanced bits of complexity exposed, but I suspect a willingness to break compatibility for the sake of performance would benefit the language a lot more than it would hurt it. I personally hope the hacker mentality and the immensely perf-driven nature of JavaScript is one day adopted by Python.

For those following, I want to make it clear that the "bits" being discussed are extremely nuanced and won't get in the way of doing obviously useful things in JavaScript.

Here's how you create a JS Object from C using Node-API: https://nodejs.org/api/n-api.html#napi_create_object

It conforms to ECMAScript 6.1.7 Object Types and is very much the same internal representation used by the VM.

Here's how one might tickle the internal representation used by Node.js (V8 in this case) to change the value of the underlying property of a JavaScript object from C: https://nodejs.org/api/n-api.html#napi_set_element