Comment by kragen

I think a more important consideration for currently produced microcontroller hardware is the ability to run from ROM, because then you can load your program into relatively abundant Flash instead of the much scarcer RAM. Some way of using virtual memory (take a look at Forth's approach, which doesn't require hardware support but doesn't work for code, only data) would also make a big difference. All of this doesn't necessarily depend on native-code compilation; microcontroller memory is a much more tightly pinching shoe than microcontroller speed.