Comment by Rochus
4 hours ago
See also https://stefan-marr.de/papers/oopsla-larose-et-al-ast-vs-byt... which demonstrates that we can do that with GraalVM/Truffle, and the generated VM from the AST based interpreter is even faster than the bytecode interpreter.
There is significant warmup required, which is not good for most programs. Deegen's approach is very promising for interactive use or other situations that require low latency.