You can do either. You can compile a snapshot and run that on the JIT VM. This basically gives you faster startup because it doesn't have to do all the source parsing, resolution, type-checking, etc. but gives you the general runtime performance of a JIT VM (think V8 or the JVM).

Or you can AoT compile your app all the way to native code. It's similar to how a shipped Go or OCaml works where it compiles your code and the language's runtime together into a single executable.