Yes, I pretty much had the same thought, but then I started thinking about multiple dispatch, calling C/Fortran libraries, polyhedral optimizations, and I realized that V8 developers may not have the same design targets in mind.
I feel like V8 faces a harder problem and has solved it ingeniously. Not to knock HotSpot, which is excellent and keeps getting better — it just seems like making the JVM go fast is not as hard as making something like JavaScript go fast. It's a tough comparison; kind of apples to oranges.
