Same for me, that's why I did this after finding out this research paper. With the proper compiler settings and small tricks you can remove some parts and already end up faster than the interpreter (because you remove some branches and a few memory accesses) and it's even possible to create "super-stencils" covering typical opcodes series and optimizing them further. Or the opposite, "sub-stencils" in order to do some loop unrolling for instance.