The Stalin compiler brutally optimizes, but how?
The key is probably the fact that it uses whole program analysis and whole program optimisation. The more you know about a how a program behaves, the more you can specialise and inline and make performant.

The MLton compiler for Standard ML does a similar thing (http://mlton.org/). There is one presentation (at least) about it: http://mlton.org/pages/References/attachments/060916-mlton.pdf. 

Earlier work was done by Craig Chambers and his group at the University of Washington (for example: http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/projects/cecil/www/pubs/jdean-thesis.html). This was done in the context of Self and later Cecil/Vortex.

There's probably more work in the Scheme/Lisp community. You probably want to consider googling "whole program optimisation".