This could make sense. In a sufficiently complex language, a single "VM" instruction translates to many native instructions. If you compile a program in such a language into native code, the size of the code explodes, resulting in really poor cache utilization. A tight interpreter on a modern processor (heavy cache fault penalties + branch prediction) can very well perform better than a natively compiled program. Performance is a very tough problem, unfortunately it's very difficult to find a "superior" solution - it just depends on far too many variables.