[nialldalton]

Yeah Michael's dissertation was out in '94 already, and he had native Oberon running in slim binaries (aka jit'ing from compressed AST) for quite a bit before that. Thomas did the Juice stuff (aka slim binaries on the web) around mid '96 IIRC, then did a continuously optimizing JIT for Oberon, then got sucked into binary translation at Transmeta.

There were a lot of fun overlaps. Robert Griesemer did his PhD at ETH around the time Michael did, on a vector extension to Oberon for a Cray. He went on to Animorphic working on Strongtalk, and later the JVM at Sun. IIRC the assembler from Strongtalk days has been extended and used in other projects like Javascript compilers. Animorphic had Urs Hoelzle / Lars Bak / Gilad Bracha too; Urs was undergrad at ETH with Michael IIRC, then worked on Self at Stanford inventing a bunch of the optimizations that went into Strongtalk and later Hotspot for Java. Etc. Etc. Small world :-)