A JITter would be able to do that. And the JVM can (and will) do the equivalent for Java code. Remember: there is nothing that specifies that C / C++ needs to

A JITter would be able to do that. And the JVM can (and will) do the equivalent for Java code. Remember: there is nothing that specifies that C / C++ needs to be compiled. Also: you could have said the same twenty years ago about many of the optimizations that currently compilers do.