Ah. I understand now.

I won't speculate about the impact of the JIT in this scenario since I've no experience with real-time necessities that comes with interacting with certain types of hardware. In my own experience playing around with hardware, latency was never really and issue. Nonetheless, in the past when I needed high level performance, I've always resorted to C++ but these scenarios weren't hardware related. Mostly string and image processing. VB6 as thin as it was still had way too many abstractions that hindered performance of certain types of algorithms.