WRT Self: some of Agesen's work on Self work for doing type inference on conventional, ahead-of-time compilation, and they got pretty good results this way! More interestingly, the opportunities the AOT compiler found were different than the opportunities the JIT compiler found, so there is some hope that they will combine constructively. See. e.g., http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~palsberg/paper/spe95.pdf