I'm pretty sure the prior art was just with Self. Smalltalk had polymorphic cache tables, but it was Self that was doing really aggressive in-lining of those

I'm pretty sure the prior art was just with Self. Smalltalk had polymorphic cache tables, but it was Self that was doing really aggressive in-lining of those caches (e.g. in-lining the method and all code the method called right into the cache). Strongtalk was a Smalltalk implementation of the result of the Self research (plus optional H&M type checking) but before they released anything they got bought by Sun to get the expertise for their up coming HotSpot VM. So bottom line: Oracle may actually own all prior art via Sun (Self research was done at Sun).