A key development in dynamic compilation happened in Xerox PARC to allow Smalltalk to run well on commercial workstations: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/80001

A key development in dynamic compilation happened in Xerox PARC to allow Smalltalk to run well on commercial workstations: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800017.800542 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800017.800542 "Efficient implementation of the smalltalk-80 system" by L. Peter Deutsch and Allan M. Schiffman in POPL '84: Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN symposium on Principles of programming languages, January 1984, Pages 297–302 This motivated the creation of the ParcPlace spinoff to commercialize this technology. It was not the first JIT, but quite a few modern ones were inspired by it. Self started out as one of the "Smalltalk-86" projects at Xerox PARC with Randy Smith collaborating with Berkeley's David Ungar. It was supposed to be a simpler and purer Smalltalk even if that made practical implementations impossible. But with David Ungar becoming a professor at Stanford, he found students that helped him make it possible, and eventually even much faster than existing Smalltalks. Craig Chambers worked on type inference for Self 1 and 2 and then Urs Hölzle worked on adaptive compilation with type feedback for Self 3 and 4. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/191080.191116 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/191080.191116 "A third-generation SELF implementation: reconciling responsiveness with performance" by Urs Hölzle and David Ungar in OOPSLA '94: Proceedings of the ninth annual conference on Object-oriented programming systems, language, and applications, October 1994, Pages 229–243 This is the technology that became "Hot Spot" for Java. But very few virtual machines have this level of sophistication.