Comment by zahlman

> I like Julia approach, compile everything on first launch, then reuse without speed penality, if you change a function, recompile that.

Python already compiles to bytecode (the .pyc files are a cache thereof). It's just that interpreting even the simple bytecode instructions can take dozens of clock cycles each. I imagine that a lot of this is not in the interpreter loop (which has seen quite a bit of optimization, IIRC up to the level of "predictive" gotos within a big switch statement within a loop) but just unwrapping objects and moving values to and from registers, dealing with the fact that there is basically never any cache coherency for anything etc.

Basically I'm not convinced that writing out the set of machine-code instructions needed to interpret the bytecodes would be a big win, because it takes too many instructions for simple tasks.