Citation for this? Julia has had a built-in interpretted since 1.0, in 2017 use `--compile=min`, or `--compile=none` to make use of it. And JuliaInterpretter.jl has been working since 2018. Both are very slow -- slower than adding in the compile time for most applications. As I understand it, this is because a number of things in how the language works are predicated on having a optimizing JIT compiler. As is how the standard library and basically all packages are written.

Julia is going to over time become nicer for scripting, just because of various improvements. In particular, I put more hope on caching native code than on any new interpreter.