Comment by OskarS

Yeah, that's the way virtual machines have been written forever, some version of

    for instruction in instructions {
        switch (instruction) {
            case OPCODE_X: //....
            case OPCODE_Y: //....
            case OPCODE_Z: //....
        }
    }

This is how VMs have been written since the dawn of time (or using computed gotos, another non-standard addition to C). It has problems though, like the fact that the `switch` branch is extremely unpredictable, and that you get a massive function which is hard to optimize. This [[musttail]] trick is a huge improvement. But yeah, if you got to support compilers that don't have [[musttail]], you in essence have to have two implementations, the [[musttail]] one and the loop/switch one.