I truly don’t understand what value a JIT would provide here. Especially in Zigs case. The language allows for full pre-compilation and the compiler is so blazingly fast it’ll finish compiling faster than the startup time of some interpreted languages. So what would adding an interpreter/JIT achieve? Absolutely nothing.

Seems to me the idea of using a JIT here is just because it’s fashionable, not because it solves a real problem.

More like why are we turning Go and Zig into Gentoo?

It is like the dumb idea of header only libraries, most likely pushed by folks that only did scripting languages before coming into a compiled language.

"Linkers? What are those for?"