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Right, those are usually called JIT compilers, not interpreters.


The distinction is not all that useful, and is blurred nowadays. You could say that CPython compiles code to bytecode, but the bytecode is then interpreted; however, none of that matters, because it's doing very little optimization and that means it's slow. Javascript is typically also not compiled ahead-of-time to native code, but it can still be very fast because of JIT; at the same time it's still very much a dynamic language which makes it share features with interpreted languages.

I'd say JIT is neither about compilation nor interpretation, but about optimization.




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