There is no bright line for when something is or is not an emulator. It's not worth thinking about too much. There is a surprisingly smooth spectrum from "direc

There is no bright line for when something is or is not an emulator. It's not worth thinking about too much. There is a surprisingly smooth spectrum from "direct emulation of hardware gates" through "full recompilation to the target architecture", with a ton of mixing and matching of all the techniques.