I would look to the UCSD p-System as a precedent to the JVM. Both are byte-code interpreted VMs. Gosling used the p-system earlier in his career, prior to joining Sun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gosling#Career_and_contr...

The Objective-C runtime is very small: just enough to do late-bound fn calls to a tree of class defs. All on top of C.

I beg to differ, given the engineering effort that went into JVM across various Java vendors, versus Apple and NeXT have done.

Proven by the fact that Swift had to be invented, as there was nothing left to fix Objective-C in a proper way.