Comment Re:Why Support Java At All? (Score 1) 264
For the needs of a modern VM, Python would be a step back from Java. To jit a language efficiently, you want to have as much information about the programs as you can get, particularly static types. Python as a dynamically typed language is about as hard to jit as Javascript is-- we're only just beginning to see adaptive compilation systems (i.e., composed baseline/optimising-compilers or composed interpreter/compilers) for that.
Python has its niche, but it's not "a platform for competing on equal terms with native-code apps for iOS".
You could pick a different statically typed language (e.g. something based on Modula-3 or Eiffel), but even if you provide a re-engineering tool to translate from the old code to the new code, you are going to alienate many of your coders, especially inexperienced ones who have trouble seeing beyond syntax. And those are in the majority, in my experience.