Of course. I have kind of a difficult line to walk here; I would like to be respectful to both the authors of the HPHPc compiler, which is a really impressive achievement, and to the many many efforts past and present at running dynamic languages. LuaJIT, various SmallTalk systems, Self systems, Erlang, HPHPc, the JVM body of work, V8,hardware-level binary translators, ... are all among the shoulders we are standing on.

All that said: I get the impression reading the comments here of an emerging misconception that "everybody knows" the right way to run these languages fast. We emphatically do not know. It is still a research problem. Heck, garbage collection, a proper subset of the problem area we're talking about here, is still pretty wide open. Given the smart people who have given decades of their career to it, we should not expect there to be a single, silver-bullet technique that cleanly maps all these dynamic languages to high-performance machine code.

So we need more than one project in the air. Some of those projects should explore whole-program analysis, like HPHPc and some of Agesen's offline work on Self, and decades of Lisp compilers. Some of them should explore runtime techniques like tracing and inline-caching. Some of them should explore unifying these approaches. We need them all.