Oberon – The Overlooked Jewel [pdf]
Compulsory Michael Franz (author of the linked paper) fanboy-ing:<p>Prof Franz did his PhD under Niklaus Wirth. His thesis was on Semantic Dictionary Encoding - a method for storing a compact semantic tree representation of a program in what is effectively a prefix code (e.g. similar to Huffman coding) that it exploits beautifully to both compress the tree and to use heuristics (the same on the encoder and decoder) to generate templated code fragments to allow the code generator on load time to do less work. Published in &#x27;94, it unfortunately was totally overshadowed by Java.<p>It&#x27;s still one of my favorite papers, and one day I still want to go down the route of actually implementing SDE properly (there are implementations for Oberon - one of the early remarkable feats was that because of the more compact representation, on MacOberon it was on some hardware faster to load and generate code from these &quot;slim binaries&quot; than it was to just load a native binary, because the code generator was fast enough to beat the disk IO cost of loading a larger binary...)<p>One of Franz&#x27; PhD students was Andreas Gal, who wrote the paper on trace trees and applied it to JIT&#x27;ing Javascript, and worked as CTO at Mozilla.