Strictly speaking, MoarVM is not an NQP interpreter - it runs MoarVM bytecode. Sure, MoarVM is by design semantically close to NQP, but if you look at $ n

Strictly speaking, MoarVM is not an NQP interpreter - it runs MoarVM bytecode. Sure, MoarVM is by design semantically close to NQP, but if you look at $ nqp-m --stagestats -e '' Stage start : 0.000 Stage parse : 0.003 Stage ast : 0.000 Stage optimize : 0.000 Stage mast : 0.005 Stage mbc : 0.000 Stage moar : 0.000 you get mostly the same steps as on the JVM $ nqp-j --stagestats -e '' Stage start : 0.000 Stage classname : 0.045 Stage parse : 0.067 Stage ast : 0.000 Stage optimize : 0.009 Stage jast : 0.145 Stage classfile : 0.010 Stage jar : 0.000 Stage jvm : 0.003 except that MoarVM bytecode files do not get bundled into JARs and there's no need to do the extra processing that happens in the 'classname' stage.