Methods and systems for platform-independent selective ahead-of-time compilation are herein described. A method selector comprising a profiling tool and heuristic selects a subset of methods for ahead-of-time compilation. The profiling tool ranks a set of methods according to predetermined criteria, and the heuristic identifies the subset of methods from the set of methods. An ahead-of-time compiler comprises a first unit and a second unit. The first unit converts, for each selected method, bytecodes corresponding to the selected method to a platform-independent intermediate representation. The second unit optimizes the platform-independent intermediate representation of each selected method, wherein each optimized intermediate representation is stored with a corresponding selected method. A virtual machine on a device converts an optimized intermediate representation associated with a selected method loaded onto the device to platform-dependent machine code.