Five years ago,
I asked why we can't have a standard VM for the web, with all code compiled down to a standard low-level language.
It got posted to HN, with
much interesting discussion, including the creator of Javascript telling me
he couldn't see it ever happening.
Today,
that same creator announces that the teams behind Chrome, IE, Firefox, and Safari are working on
WebAssembly.
(I may be excited by this. And I'm claiming full responsibility, of course.)
Edit:
Brendan
responds over on HN that it's not really a bytecode, but instead a compressed AST encoding. Which I know just enough about to get a feel for what he means, but would need to do some research to be comfortable explaining it to other people. Luckily, he then says that he doesn't mind others calling it a bytecode if it makes them happy :->