I don't think we disagree that the long-term goal is to _eventually_ make it faster :) I rather meant to temper the enthusiasm that some could have upon seeing "JIT" and immediately trying to compare with, say, PyPy.
> enable JIT codegen without sacrificing too much performance
This is the part I don't buy. The main point of a JIT is performance, so by definition I don't see it being enabled unless it improves performance across the board.
What I wonder is if the current approach, stated as "copy-and-patch auto-generated code for each opcode", can ever reach that point without being replaced by a completely different design along the way. AFAIK, as is, the main difference between running the interpreter loop composed of normally compiled opcodes and JIT copy-and-patching these opcodes is lack of the opcode dispatch logic running between each op - which is good, but also countered by slightly worse quality of the copied code.
> enable JIT codegen without sacrificing too much performance
This is the part I don't buy. The main point of a JIT is performance, so by definition I don't see it being enabled unless it improves performance across the board.
What I wonder is if the current approach, stated as "copy-and-patch auto-generated code for each opcode", can ever reach that point without being replaced by a completely different design along the way. AFAIK, as is, the main difference between running the interpreter loop composed of normally compiled opcodes and JIT copy-and-patching these opcodes is lack of the opcode dispatch logic running between each op - which is good, but also countered by slightly worse quality of the copied code.