...oh, I think I see what you're saying. If you have hardware that can predict jump-to-pointer and not just jump-to-literal, that can make quite a difference in how well more dynamic languages / paradigms perform compared to more static ones. I was thinking more along the lines of languages giving programmers (the appearance of) the ability to tweak their code to take advantage of these things, and "don't bother, the compiler is smarter than you are".

Branch prediction and processor caches help all languages, and low level languages like C and C++ even more than dynamic languages. What I'm saying is that smart compilers are not in any way a substitute for branch prediction and processor caches, on the contrary: smart compilers are designed to take the best advantage of these features. And on the point why C and C++ are still relevant because of this: it's basically impossible to fully take advantage of e.g. processor caches in languages like Java and Ruby because you cannot fully influence how your data structures are laid out in memory. You can in C and C++. Sure, in theory smart compilers could do that for you, but in practice they don't. And the problem is so difficult that we probably get that in compilers working about as well as a human C/C++ programmer around the same time that we get strong AI.