It doesn't matter if it was a Delphi interpreter. Having an unsandboxed interpreter running unsigned code was a stupid move. That some C++ developer thought it wise to do this is perhaps part of the issue.

V8 on the server has a very nice eventloop that's very easy to leverage for high performance while avoiding horrifying overflow issues and fits well for a large majority of web request/response patterns while still offering significant developer speed.

To be fair, this is the case in just about everything. If you know one language or tool, most will use that tool to do what they need instead of learning something else that might or might not be used ever again.

Some even find it fun to bend something that isn't meant to be bent.

It's the only kind of JIT'd code you're allowed to run on iOS without going through Apple's approval process. Pebble apps use JS for any code they need to run on the phone (as opposed to the watch) for this reason.

> @paraboul is on point: JS is often used only because the developer knows nothing else.

I never said that.

JavaScript is one of the fastest scripting languages, for one. It often has pretty decent bindings to native code as well.

JavaScript is the only thing that you can really run on any semi-modern device. TVs, phones, laptops, desktops, servers, the only thing you can expect to execute on all of them is JavaScript. If you write your core libraries in JavaScript, you'll have that much less to worry about re-implementing and maintaining in something else. You'll have flexibility to potentially execute the same code on either client or server, phone or desktop. There are situations where that's pretty useful.

More than that, at least last time I checked, V8 is really fast. It is many times faster than the usable Python implementations, or practically any other memory-managed runtime. Only luajit seemed to sit in the same ballpark when I pulled up the shoot-out a couple years back.

I personally hate all of these facts, but sometimes, they really do mean that prioritizing JavaScript, or at least something that compiles down to JavaScript, is the best choice.