I didn’t mean to say I think it’s possible in this particular case for arbitrary code (particular for something as wild as Perl!). I was merely explaining (what I think) is the logic behind the approach.

The only circumstance I can see where a true JIT will beat out native code is when there are many possible paths of execution such that all may not be possible to evaluate at compile time. In that case it’s not even really interpreted vs compiled so much as static vs adaptive.