Author here! I actually tried using AOT and it actually decreased the performance by about 35%. I think it's because Game Boy games tend use a small number of instructions a lot more than the others, so the JIT can optimize for them, while AOT has to be more conservative.

AOT vs JIT is always interesting since JIT depends on the runtime actually deciding to bother running the later passes to get more optimized code.

And sorry for the paranoia, I find a lot of people tried f# or even c# back in 4.x Framework era and think it hasn't changed.