We can have both a JIT and a "deep and extensive" (or more importantly, stable) native API, as demonstrated by node. Yes, but not that native API. Designing a

We can have both a JIT and a "deep and extensive" (or more importantly, stable) native API, as demonstrated by node. Yes, but not that native API. Designing a native API that doesn't create huge problems later is difficult. The JVM, .NET and V8 guys managed it (mostly) but the scripting languages generally didn't. Their API is just literally the entire internals of the interpreter. Figuring out how to JIT code in the presence of native extensions that expect the implementation to work in exactly the same way it always worked is a research problem. The only people who have got close to solving it are the GraalVM guys. They do it by virtualising the interpreter API and also JIT-compiling the C code! They run LLVM bitcode on the same engine that runs the scripting engine.