What are the benefits of an ability to compile to machine code? Does it mean you can make stand alone binaries (I.e. programs that can run without the language - lisp|R|python - installed), or is there some other advantage, eg performance?
It is IMO not known widely enough that Python itself can be compiled, using Nuitka [0] compiler. It still runs Python code, so the performance increase is not as extreme as one would get from rewriting in a fully statically typed code, but the AOT compiled C code is still faster than the interpreter.
There are some optimizations that can be made a compile-time that can speed up the computations. It also makes it portable provided that the executables are provided for each desired platform.