That depends on whether you consider the Smalltalk and Self research at Sun and Xeroc PARC to be "academia". Much of the JVM optimization technology came direct

That depends on whether you consider the Smalltalk and Self research at Sun and Xeroc PARC to be "academia". Much of the JVM optimization technology came directly from those. http://selflanguage.org/documentation/published/index.html http://selflanguage.org/documentation/published/index.html The paper "An Efficient Implementation of Self" (http://selflanguage.org/documentation/published/implementation.html http://selflanguage.org/documentation/published/implementati...) is a good overview. Lua is another language with a great JIT compiler, LuaJIT. There are several papers about Lua (http://www.lua.org/doc/jucs05.pdf http://www.lua.org/doc/jucs05.pdf, http://www.lua.org/papers.html http://www.lua.org/papers.html) and a bunch of good mailing list posts about LuaJIT (e.g. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.lua.general/58908 http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.lua.general/58908).