I believe native code generation is a work in progress. On the release topic, it was stated that they currently didn’t know how to efficiently generate native code without drastically slowing down load times:
The annotation is currently required because we don’t yet have a good mechanism for automatically determining if compiling a given function is profitable, and compiling every function to native will make Studio start slower because of the sheer amount of Luau code that tends to run in plugins these days. We plan to develop automatic heuristics that will allow us to automatically determine if this is worthwhile in the future, along with per-function annotations to help guide this decision, but for now, you need to manually place --!native in performance-intensive scripts.
This topic has been very informative, thanks!
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