Out of curiosity when did you write that interpreter? The entire dotnet ecosystem has seen massive speed improvements over the years, particularly for anyone who last tried them during the Framework era. Hell they even put work in to improving tail calls which the c# compiler doesn't even take advantage of (also either in the dotnet 9 or 10 timeframe f# added an attribute to make it so a recursive call that isn't a tail call throws a compiler error so you can't accidentally screw that up).

It's .NET 10 lol. It's not so slow you can't write stuff for it, I have implementations of Conway's game of life, Huffman compression, and a minimal TUI. The main problem is doing almost anything in it involves a method lookup. And there are almost certainly places I could have done things more smartly.

One thing I do want to try out is publishing it with native AOT. I had a lot of luck with that on one of my other F# projects, I got like a 75% speedup out of it. I understand the JIT is supposed to outperform native AOT in the long term but I haven't seen it reach that speed.