There is threaded bytecode as well, which uses direct jumping vs a switch for dispatch. This can improve branch prediction, though it is a debated topic and may not offer much improvement for modern processors.
Do you have perhaps some links/references on that?
I have once tried benchmarking it by writing a tiny VM interpreter and a corresponding threaded one with direct jumps in Zig (which can force inline a call, so I could do efficient direct jumps) and I have - to me surprisingly- found that the naive while-switch loop was faster, even though the resulting assembly of the second approach seemed right.
I wasn’t sure if I saw it only due to my tiny language and dumb example program, or if it’s something deeper. E.g. the JVM does use direct threaded code for their interpreter.
The jump target is compiled into the bytecode, so rather than return to the big switch statement, it jumps straight to the next opcode's implementation. The process is called "direct threading". These days a decent switch-based interpreter should fit in cache, so I'm not sure direct threading is much of a win anymore.
