There is compile-time metaprogramming, staged programming, and many other things. Yes. Indeed the blog post neglects to go into detail about those for brevity. But, the point of the blog post was after all to get you guys to read the actual paper. Perhaps that wasn't explicit enough. Sorry.

The main point of the paper is to show that runtime metaprogramming can be optimized with a classic JIT-compilation technique. After one sees it, it's kind of trivial, but it isn't done in common VMs.