As I understand, the cause of the speed difference between compiled languages and python is, that the first compiles code all way to the native machine's code, whereas python compiles to python bytecode, to be interpreted by the PVM. I see that this way python codes can be used on multiple operation system (at least in most cases), however I do not understand, why is not there an additional (and optional) compiler for python, which compiles the same way as traditional compilers. This would leave to the programmer to chose, which is more important to them; multiplatform executability or performance on native machine. In general; why are not there any languages which could be behave both as compiled and interpreted?