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.