Very true on functions calls, suppose I could have been more explicit. Personally I was surprised at some of the cost for some of core functions, particularly when they can sometimes be re-written in JavaScript itself to run faster. I made a couple of article edits to highlight this.
Also, the variability across browsers is at times quite surprising.
Finally,take a look at a whole slew of commonly used libraries that contain map and forEach all over the place for things that need to be fast like set operations, cross products, large matrix traversal, etc.
A down compiler really would be nice, write the code using map or forEach and have is automatically converted ...
Think I'll wait for WASM rather than go back to C++. Personally, I wish LISP had been chosen as the programming language of the web ... which should make it obvious why I like JavaScript.