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First featured in Self many years ago, done by the same folks (Lars Bak and crew) who brought you V8. Then Sun bought their Smalltalk/Self-based company, and they built HotSpot for the JVM. Then Google hired them to do the same for Javascript, and now we have V8.

It generally takes about 10-20 years to get truly new ideas from the labs to consumer-level products.

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Neither Self nor HotSpot uses tracing. It's a relatively new compilation technique, the implementation in the original tracing paper used java bytecode as the source language.

I think you are confusing tracing with adaptive compilation.

Actually there's even older work using tracing for re-optimization of assembley :)

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