JIT compiler vs offline compilers

Question

Are there scenarios where JIT compiler is faster than other compilers like C++?

Do you think in the future JIT compiler will just see minor optimizations, features b

Answer 1

A point not yet mentioned which favors "off-line" compilers is that such compilers can usefully target platforms with small amounts of RAM--even as few as sixteen BYTES. To be sure, anything that's even remotely PC compatible is apt to have (literally) millions of times more RAM than that, but I think it will be awhile before one can find a machine with many megs of RAM that costs less than $0.50 and consumes less than a milliwatt of power during operation.

Note that the 16 bytes of RAM isn't quite so feeble as it sounds, since the chips with such small RAM don't store code in RAM--have a separate non-volatile area of memory to hold code (384 bytes is the smallest I know of). That's not a lot, of course, but it's enough to allow a $0.25 processor to perform functions that would otherwise require $1.00 worth of discrete components.