[Joeri]

Yeah, but all the popular bytecode engines end up being versioned anyway. I don't doubt that bytecode would allow for adding some syntactic sugar without upgrading the browser engine, but so does JS-to-JS compilation, which is available today, even on IE6. And if people really wanted those features, wouldn't there be tons of objective-j programmers?

[chc]

No, because Objective-J essentially just adds Objective-C syntax on top of JavaScript — but most people don't particularly love the syntax of Objective-C. You look at one language's lack of popularity and extrapolate that people just must not like languages.

[Joeri]

First of all, a lot more people like that syntax than you make it out to be. It's popular enough that objective-j should have caught on. The fact that it didn't is telling.

Secondly, I was only using it as an example. I base my opinion on the lack of popularity of all cross-compilation engines except GWT. There's two ways of looking at that. One is that GWT proves the demand for other languages because of its success. The other is that GWT proves the demand for other languages is not that big, because otherwise those other languages would have GWT-like platforms in the field already. I'm partial to the latter.