[mike_hearn]

I'd say the appliance market did pan out actually. BluRay players all contain an embedded JVM, as do many other kinds of set top box, as do of course all Android smart TVs.

Abstracting the CPU has worked out pretty well for the Java platform. Look at how easy the 64 bit transition was for the Java world vs the C++ world. Visual Studio is still not a 64 bit app and yet Java IDEs hardly even noticed the change. The transition on Linux was just a disaster zone, every distro came up with their own way of handling the incompatible flavours of each binary.

In addition, a simple JIT compiled instruction set makes on the fly code generation a lot easier in many cases and it's a common feature of Java frameworks. For instance the java.lang.reflect.Proxy feature is one I was using just the other day and it works by generating and loading bytecode at runtime. On the fly code generation is considered a black art for native apps and certainly extremely non portable, but is relatively commonplace and approachable in Java.