[hctaw]

Pure anecdote, but I've never seen a project become less native.

Meanwhile state of the art JITs (for .NET, JVM, Swift, and other traditionally managed runtimes) are increasingly blurring what it means for a language to be native and what the benefits for "native" even are.

So I don't think it's useful to think in terms of niches, because niches are constantly disappearing within our ecosystems. We're reaching a point where the implementation of a language is mostly a solved problem (throw it on top of some JIT for a bigger language) and the only meaningful innovation is in the semantics and syntax of a language for expressing intent and providing soundness.

If we're skating to where the puck is going here, I wouldn't say it makes sense to ignore native compilation for functional languages because that's a well served niche, but because AOT compilation itself is becoming niche.