That eventually turned into JITs, and it's still a very powerful technique for tight loops on modern processors, although the pipeline means the benefit happens with more iterations than on the old non-pipelined/cacheless CPUs. It can even be done across multiple cores, as I coincidentally explained here a short while ago:
I don't think SMC has ever been "relatively mainstream", at least after HLLs gained popularity over Asm. But in Asm, it still has its uses where a full JIT would be far too much overhead.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12485205
I don't think SMC has ever been "relatively mainstream", at least after HLLs gained popularity over Asm. But in Asm, it still has its uses where a full JIT would be far too much overhead.