There was a company in the '90s that was working on a byte code representation of programs which was designed to be “optimally” small by encoding more at the AST level than the ASM level. There were papers, but they were acquired by Microsoft (I think) and vanished. Does anyone remember them? The papers would be interesting in light of this, and conveniently near the end of patent lifetimes if patented and solid prior art if not.
Edit: Maybe I'm thinking of Michael Franz and Thomas Kistler's work on “Slim Binaries”. It matches the content if not the ambiance that I remember. It's been a while. My brain tapes could have print-through.
Edit: Maybe I'm thinking of Michael Franz and Thomas Kistler's work on “Slim Binaries”. It matches the content if not the ambiance that I remember. It's been a while. My brain tapes could have print-through.
“A Tree-Based Alternative to Jave Byte-Codes” http://www.ics.uci.edu/~franz/Site/pubs-pdf/C05.pdf
“Adaptive Compression of Syntax Trees and Iterative Dynamic Code Optimization: Two Basic Technologies for Mobile-Object Systems” http://www.ics.uci.edu/~franz/Site/pubs-pdf/BC01.pdf