APL programs are normally interpreted and less often compiled. In reality, most APL compilers translated source APL to a lower level language such as C, leaving the machine-specific details to the lower level compiler. Compilation of APL programs was a frequently discussed topic in conferences. Although some of the newer enhancements to the APL language such as nested arrays have rendered the language increasingly difficult to compile, the idea of APL compilation is still under development today.
In the past, APL compilation was regarded as a means to achieve execution speed comparable to other mainstream languages, especially on mainframe computers. Several APL compilers achieved some levels of success, though comparatively little of the development effort spent on APL over the years went to perfecting compilation into machine code..