[pornel]

This can happen in languages that use dynamic constructs that can't be optimized out. For example, there was a PHP-to-native compiler (HipHop/HPHPc) that lost to faster interpreters and JIT.

Apple's Rosetta 2 translates x86-64 to aarch64 that runs surprisingly fast, despite being mostly a straightforward translation of instructions, rather than something clever like a recompiling optimizing JIT.

And the plain old C is relatively fast without optimizations, because it doesn't rely on abstraction layers being optimized out.