Yup, that's definitely true, but opcode parsing and dispatch needs to be a really tight loop. Keep in mind that function calls still involve pushing/popping sta

Yup, that's definitely true, but opcode parsing and dispatch needs to be a really tight loop. Keep in mind that function calls still involve pushing/popping stack frames, which while super, super cheap, are still not free. There are no loops other than the main loop in here, and every instruction takes constant time, which means that constant factors in opcode parsing and dispatch are going to really dominate.