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  • Your question has already some very good answers here: stackoverflow.com/questions/3925947/… Commented Jun 2, 2015 at 17:47
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    @delnan my point is that "what stops C from being being compiled/interpreted/JIT'ed" really looses its meaning when the language may target a virtual machine that has JIT or situations where the vm will identify missing features in hardware and recompile the code to match the existing hardware (such as with OpenGL (written in C) on OSX for different graphics cards). No, you can't grab something compiled to target llvm on one machine and run it as such on another processor. But the compiled / interpreted / JIT line can be quite blurred. Commented Jun 2, 2015 at 19:16
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    Java is often hyped for it's amazing portability. It's portable to systems where the JVM has been compiled, which is to say, systems for which the JVM (written in C) has been compiled. There is nothing that prevents handling C code in the same way, except that nobody sees enough benefit from doing it to justify the effort. Commented Jun 2, 2015 at 22:06
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    I'm puzzled about this bit: "what stops C from being compiled/[...]". Uh, nothing? Commented Jun 2, 2015 at 23:29
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    C compilers are pretty quick these days so " make myprog.c ; myprog " will probably run faster than most interpreters. Commented Jun 3, 2015 at 9:24