Float Speed Espruino Pico VS Pyboard

Yes - the Python interpreter in the Pyboard is significantly faster - Espruino was designed for much more constrained devices, so cares more bout memory usage and less about outright speed.

You're seeing a whole bunch of differences here...

• The pyboard has twice the clock speed - 168MHz vs 84MHz
  
• Micropython compiles to bytecode first (sometimes even native code), whereas Espruino interprets from source - which really hurts performance. You could try E.setFlags({pretokenise:1}) at the start of your code to give you a bit of a speed boost though.
  
• JavaScript uses 64 bit floats for all numbers, which the built-in floating point unit in these chips is useless for - so it's all done in software. If Python uses 32 bit floats it'll have a huge advantage (but it may not be).
  
  

@asez using compiled code, all integer code will be very fast - however for floating point it falls back to Espruino's built-in maths library (because of the hassle of linking in all the double maths functions), so it'll suffer a performance hit too.

However it looks like clock-for-clock JS code with the compiled directive is still faster than standard MicroPython, which I'm pretty happy about. If you did a purely integer benchmark I imagine compiled JS would give you some really impressive figures.