[csl]

I do see your point, but I tried to make it clear that this is compilation in an extremely restricted sense: It specializes and executes a function at runtime. And I wanted to cover the core technique of doing just that.

Perhaps I should have included a small example of compiling a linear list of abstract instructions into machine code. But that again would consist of compiling small templates in a coherent way, just like many actual compilers do.

Anyway, point taken, and maybe I'll expand the article or follow up on it.

[defined]

My subsequent comment acknowledges that JIT means more than compilation at runtime. In .NET desktop, it means compilation of all CIL to native on every run, just before execution. To me, that's just executing the second pass of a compiler at launch time, but Anders Hejlsberg says it's JIT[1], and I'm not going to argue :)

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1255828/4158187

[csl]

Anyway, I've made a follow-up post that shows how to JIT compile a subset of Python, directly based on the previous techniques: https://csl.name/post/python-compiler/