What is a former q3 champion doing these days? I'm genuinely curious. Since you are on hacker news I assume you do something with software. Any skills that you picked up back then that are useful today?
Firmware is using cache as RAM (e.g. https://www.coreboot.org/images/6/6c/LBCar.pdf) to do early init, like DRAM training. I guess later things in the boot chain rely on DRAM being set up probably though.
Probably a OpenJDK Zero VM build. That's a configuration without JIT or template interpreter, but a "plain" C++ switch dispatch interpreter that requires no runtime code generation.
Sure, but neither javac (the Java to bytecode compiler) or HotSpot are doing that. The former tries to preserve as much as possible, and for the latter interprocedure analysis is too costly at run-time.