Just-in-time compilation is not a new idea. According to the book "The Practice of Programming" (by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike, Ch9, pg. 242): "Generalizi

Just-in-time compilation is not a new idea. According to the book "The Practice of Programming" (by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike, Ch9, pg. 242): "Generalizing the idea for the full set of operations, we can write an on-the-fly compiler that translates the current regular expression into special code optimized for that expression. Ken Thompson did exactly this for an implementation of regular expressions on the IBM 7094 in 1967. His version generated little blocks of binary 7094 instructions for the various operations in the expressions, threaded them together, and then ran the resulting program by calling it, just like a regular function."