Devs often complain about Java being boring and old-school, but it never ceases to amaze me how cool Java and Java-related techs are (JDK, JVM, GC etc.)!
Literally, state of the art, almost alien technology. And it seems that more cool stuff is coming.
Besides JRuby mentioned in TFA, there are awesome languages you can use like Scala, Clojure, Kotlin or even Haskell [0], all enabled by a runtime that proved to be truly multi-language, as in alternative languages are not just superficial syntactic sugar for Java (like CoffeeScript is for JS, or VB.NET is for C#).
Every time I have to use Java, the language, I hate it, however those languages are not Java, yet can leverage the decades of knowledge, libraries and tools built on top of the JVM.
It's a little funny in retrospective, I remember Microsoft's marketing in early 2000 and .NET developers were saying "Java is single language, multi-platform and .NET is multi-language, single-platform". Nowadays both statements are false.
And honestly, while well thought out and engineered, it hardly qualifies as almost alien technology.
The thesis it's based on points out there are no published papers covering exactly this technique, but are in fact two other production implementations that do basically the same thing (luajit and pypy) that exist.
That's usually a really good sign that what you've done is not that novel (in the sense of being straightforward to those in the world) even if it is really good engineering.