It's "extremely lazy ahead of time compiled", is one way I've described the compilation model, since you're basically never executing code in an interpreted fashion (usually jits let you do either). Also, typically jit's choice of when to but may be non-deterministic, or deterministic but difficult to understand. When Julia chooses to compile is pretty easy to understand
I believe though that there is some work being done on actually directly interpreting the AST, in cases where going through all the work of generating LLVM IR and compiling that to native code is unnecessary, particularly when it is code that is only run once when a package is compiled the first time.
