The Self bytecode was pretty close to an abstract syntax tree, though not huffman-compressed. How is it that nobody has mentioned Self yet in this thread? Self was doing JIT compiling from a platform-independent bytecode in the late 80s and getting within a factor of 2 of C performance by the early 90s.
Except that the slim binaries concept is not based on byte code at all, but more like a Huffman compressed abstract syntax tree. Not only are the binaries smaller, they can potentially be optimised further because no semantic information is lost.
See also this blog post for more details: https://hokstad.com/semantic-dictionary-encoding
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