They're not the same. VMs can assume invariants (which may not always hold) and compile specialized methods which depend on those assumptions and then fall bac

They're not the same. VMs can assume invariants (which may not always hold) and compile specialized methods which depend on those assumptions and then fall back to a non-optimized version during the execution of a method. To do something like that (OSR) in C, you'll have to have a very sophisticated runtime.