Look up work by Stefan Brunthaler, like this overview paper ("Virtual-Machine Abstraction and Optimization Techniques"): https://www.sba-research.org/wp-content/uploads/publications...

Make sure to check out the references. I especially like "Ertl, M. A. and D. Gregg, The structure and performance of efficient interpreters, Journal of Instruction-Level Parallelism 5 (2003)"