alt Hacker NewsCompilers are pretty good. Really good, even. But languages, even C, are abstractions, which necessarily constrain the level below. This threaded-code jump thing is just not possible to express in C. Even the best abstraction can often be beaten by something the abstraction can't express. Self-modifying code is one example. So is this threaded interpreter with its non-structured control flow.
But it takes longer. It's more difficult. That's why the abstraction exists and is still very useful despite its limitations.
Self-modifying code is a meme unless you're writing an obfuscator... (but even then you can hook the execution so it's a pretty low-tier anti-reversing effort ngl)
For perf reasons it's the equivalent of shooting your leg off to lose weight. You're flushing the instruction cache and breaking prefetch, leading to a huge stall. Then you do it again. And again. It hasn't been in vogue since the 80s...