Not a game programmer but, impression I get is a number of games use interpreted languages as glue. Certainly sound to me like thee is a dichotomy between must run fast at all costs, and must be flexible speed matters not at all.
I think game programming is an area where a high percentage of the code base needs to run fast, even if it's not run very often. If it causes the frame rate to slip, the user is going to notice.
In my case, embedded, optimizing for size is everything. And usually only a very small portion of the code needs to run fast. One problem that people are running into with optimizing compilers is with embedded often you are interested in the physical side effects of your code, not it's mathematical end state. Optimizing compilers are increasing not respecting the former in preference to the latter.
