I suppose it depends on where you are looking for dynamicity. In some ways, lua is much more laissez faire of course.

But in Python, everything is an object, which is why, as I said, it spends much of its time looking things up. And things like bindings for closures are late, so that's more lookups as well.

In lua, many things aren't objects, and, for example, you can add two numbers without looking anything up. Another issue, of course, when you do that, is that you could conceivably overflow an integer, but that can't happen in Python either.

The Python interpreter has some fast paths for specific object types, but it is really limited in the optimizations it can do, because there simply aren't any unboxed types.

Hmmm… I did about 20+ years of C++ coding and since I’ve been doing Rust I haven’t seen any of these issues. It has trivial integrations with c/c++ libraries (often with wrappers already written), often better native libraries to substitute those c++ deps wholesale, and separate compilation out of the box. It has dynamic linking if you really need it via the C ABI or even rlib although I’ll grants the latter is not as mature.

The syntax and ownership rules can take some getting used to but after doing it I start to wonder how I ever enjoyed the masochism of the rule of 5 magic incantation that no one else ever followed and writing the class definition twice. + the language gaining complexity constantly without ever paying back tech debt or solving real problems.