[Jetrel]

The webassembly crew is pretty much doing exactly this.

They've worked pretty closely with the folks who designed java bytecode, to try to learn from their institutional knowledge (repeating what they felt they did well, but learning from their perceived mistakes).

It hopefully will end up really nice, because it could provide us with a machine-agnostic IR that will work everywhere, have high performance, and if it becomes popular on the web, I could it leaking into the desktop space and starting to become a standard there as well.