Writing a compiler seems like a much harder problem than an interpreter. That might be true today, but I would argue that it was not the case some 60 years ago.

Microsoft Build of OpenJDK, the company’s open source distribution of Java, has added an experimental feature to improve escape analysis compiler optimization results. With a patch and security ...

GraalVM allows Java, Scala, and Kotlin (which are based on the JVM), as well as JavaScript, Ruby, R, and Python, to run with zero interoperability overhead (such as serialization and deserialization).