[pjmlp]

Yep, just like....wait for it....UCSD Pascal.

[pcwalton]

Nobody is saying that the idea of a sandboxed VM is original. The interesting parts of wasm are the theoretically-uninteresting but important-in-practice features: JS interoperability, the LLVM backend, cross-browser support, etc.

[pjmlp]

Well, many are behaving as such.

Actually JVM got there first with JS-interoperabily.