The Python community is about to offer us a free lunch. A new compliant interpreter, pypy, is already 4.3x faster than cPython, and getting faster everyday. It shows that there is not conceptual reason why high-level dynamic languages should be slow.
For MyHDL, an HDL implemented as a Python library, the results are even more spectacular: my benchmarks run
8-20x faster on pypy. In a single strike, this makes MyHDL simulation performance competitive with Verilog/VHDL.Jan