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; how

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.