I think the _copy-and-patch_ approach [0] is probably the best compromise here.

You get many of the guarantees of compiled code (strong correctness, reduced mismatch between interpreter vs JIT semantics, etc.), while still being very close to native performance.

In fact, Python is already moving in that direction: the new bytecode-based copy-and-patch JIT in Python 3.13 shows correct results even before heavy performance tuning.

So to me this seems like a very promising road: I wonder how practical this is if the base language is not C/C++ but Rust (or any kind of memory safe language).

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.13127