No, what you've produced is a transcompiler which takes the source code from one language and converts it to source code in another language at the same high le

No, what you've produced is a transcompiler which takes the source code from one language and converts it to source code in another language at the same high level. The fact there isn't a 1:1 mapping between the source language and the destination language isn't relevant. Strangely, it doesn't appear the Dragon Book mentions transcompilation, but Wikipedia has a decent definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcompiler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcompiler This isn't static compilation in any sense of the definition as you're not producing a low-level language, i.e. assembly or machine code. Ultimately the JVM will do some combination of static and JIT compilation, but your code isn't doing this. In no way am I deriding your effort, you've just got your definitions mixed up. The JVM tends to run in a relatively large memory footprint compared to the MRI, although the JVM will execute faster when it's warmed up. The JVM isn't known for being frugal when it comes to memory usage. For long running processes, your transcompiler could be very useful.