[stephenrkell]

Not sure whether you're disagreeing with the paper or the commenter's summary of it. As you could probably guess from the title of the paper, the goal is not a new "fully general" VM.

An analogy I sometimes use is pre-IP internetworking. If you wanted a new cross-network application, then of course you could in principle build application-layer gateways, but the economics simply didn't work. It took a carefully engineered "hourglass waist" to fix the economics. The goal is to create the equivalent for language implementations. And the whole point is that "one super-VM" is not the recipe.