Writing decent indentation for a major mode is very hard. You need a non-trivial performant parser. I dare not look at perl-mode or C++.
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LLVM's lit tool for testing files is the most successful testing DSL I've ever seen. It's used a decent number of projects outside of LLVM.
By contrast I don't see many folks using e.g. Cucumber these days.
A decent part of VMs being faster than AST interpreters is just memory layout AIUI.
VM instructions are largely flat arrays, so there's less pointer chasing.
Emacs' support for OCaml is exceptionally good. Not only does tuareg-mode have a decent REPL integration, but it even has thorough 'pair' highlighting for keywords!
Even more impressively, merlin-eldoc understands scope and shadowing when highlighting symbols!
