The JVM JIT was originally targeted to SELF, not Java.
Yes, that's right. The guys that developed Self (David Ungar et al.) then set out to develop a high-performance typed Smalltalk using the optimization techniques they developed for Self. The Smalltalk system never hit the market as the development team was acquired by Sun before that could happen. The Smalltalk system they were working on was released to the public: http://www.strongtalk.org/
I think you'll find HotSpot evolved from a Smalltalk JIT originally.
The reason I replied to this is that the original technology developed for Self was not a JIT. It was a runtime byte code optimizer that was put into Java named HotSpot. Since HotSpot operates at runtime it can optimize things an optimizing compiler could not find at compile time. This is why Java sometimes catches up very good performance and in isolated cases can compete with C.
