I'm not super-expert, but know of some background. I think Rosyln grew very much out of Delphi, and Anders Hejlsberg is the common thread to both. Before that, he did Turbo Pascal, which might have been incremental in some ways (it certainly was very fast).
Another earlier example of successful incremental technology was the Java compiler in Eclipse.
I'm sure there are academic efforts as well, but don't know as much about these.
I thought the main technology behind Roslyn is some researched or customly engineered parser/semantic analyzer that came out of MSR. The original C# parser was quite typical.
Another earlier example of successful incremental technology was the Java compiler in Eclipse.
I'm sure there are academic efforts as well, but don't know as much about these.