There a number of JVM's written in Java with an mini interpreter in machine code. All code starts in the interpreter. GC and JIT run on themselves, more and mo

There a number of JVM's written in Java with an mini interpreter in machine code. All code starts in the interpreter. GC and JIT run on themselves, more and more code gets optimized and no longer runs in the mini interpreter but actually is machine code. I believe maxime and JikesVM are java with minimal assembly interpreters. There is one for Squeek and smalltalk as well. PyPy probably fits in this category as well. All though all of these are meta circular now. i.e. the assembly mini interpreter has been thrown away and the generated machine code saved and shipped as a bin/exe.