Fastest practical language

I know this is subjective so there is no one answer but I would like to hear your opinions anyway.

Which language has the fastest performance for most tasks while still being practical to write in?

>>43
I just spent 2 hours finding why my script stopped with Wrapped Native exception and rewriting it several times.
apparently you can't alias functions at all. Here example of this 'sanity'
id=document.getElementById;<--this should work..in theory
function c(a){return id(a)};<-- this is a normal function call
alert(c('code')) <--fails. Firefox errors anytime you try this.