The new SQL evaluation engine in Vitess is significantly faster than the previous implementation, with performance improvements ranging from 20x to 50x compared to the original AST-based dynamic implementation. The new virtual machine design, which uses a callback-based approach and takes advantage of Go's closures feature, enables efficient execution of statically typed SQL expressions without requiring runtime type switching. This results in faster compilation times, easier maintenance, and improved performance. The benchmarks show that the new virtual machine outperforms both the original AST interpreter and the C++ implementation in MySQL, with some queries taking up to 20x less time to execute.