Clearly, Chris's thought process has to be correct to some real extent and mostly must be deferred to in the end; but, I was a grad student interested in the Lo

Clearly, Chris's thought process has to be correct to some real extent and mostly must be deferred to in the end; but, I was a grad student interested in the Low-Level Virtual Machine at the time, and I remember it was absolutely considered by everyone to be a runtime execution system with a JIT ;P and what made it unique vs. "high-level" virtual machines was that it was going to allow unsafe code, trusted by default, but otherwise work like any other virtual machine, allowing for JIT-like benefits (profile guided being one, as you mention)... I am totally willing to believe that everyone misunderstood the project at the time and the at the well over a decade since has corrupted what memory I have of the discussions.