I'm not convinced that it's purely an implementation issue. While maybe that's true in a theoretical sense, I don't think it holds true in practice. There are

I'm not convinced that it's purely an implementation issue. While maybe that's true in a theoretical sense, I don't think it holds true in practice. There are various characteristics of programming languages that can make it much easier to implement them as interpreted languages rather than compiled languages, and vice versa. Maybe any difficulties could be overcome given enough resources, but this usually isn't the case. I think this is why the efforts to make compilers for a language like Python have never really been that successful. And the same goes for the attempts to create interpreters for languages like C and C++. Perhaps the most success has been with the various compilers that compile Java source or bytecode to native code. But even in that case, the end result usually isn't very good. It's usually somewhere in the undesirable middle, giving the worst of both compilation and interpretation.