Comment by fho

Honestly it always depends on what "faster" means for you. For one crowd faster means "fast number crunching" (e.g. anything AI these days). There statically compiled code reigns supreme because it is mostly about how fast your very specialized code (e.g. matrix multiplications) runs and it does not hurt if you just ship a specialized, statically compiled version for all possible targets. (iirc GCC does something like that when building generic code that will utilize different code sets (SSE,AVX,etc) when they are available at runtime.

For another crowd "fast" means that the code they haphazardly thrown together in an interpreted language runs fast enough that nobody is negatively affected (which is a completely valid usecase, not judging here).

And to answer your question for examples:

An interpreter with JIT compiler might for example notice that you have a for loop that always gets run with the same number of arguments, unroll the loop and at the same time vectorize the instructions for an immediate 4x gain in execution speed.

Otoh Javas Hotspot JIT compiler tracked how often code was called and once a "hotspot" was identified compiled that part of the program.

Last example: if you are using an interpreted language (say Python) every roundtrip through "python-land" costs you ... A simple for loop that just runs a simple instruction (say: acc = 0; for x in xs: acc += x) will be orders of magnitudes slower that calling a dedicated function (numly.sum(xs)), JITing that code (e.g. with numba) will remove the roundtrip through python and achieve similar speeds.