[pjmlp]

Basically WebAssembly is anything but new.

You can also check Burroughs, Xerox PARC Workstations, USCD Pascal, Modula-2 MeDos, IBM AS/400, TenDRA, Taos, Oberon, among many others, that have had the idea of bytecode as portable OS binaries.

[ori_b]

Though, wasm has a high level structure that makes it a clunky compilation target. The bytecodes above improve on wasm in that regard.

[ilaksh]

The high level structure is an advancement that is important for optimization.

[ori_b]

It isn't; the first thing production optimizers do is throw it away.

It supposedly makes verification of SSA properties marginally faster, but that's not the bottleneck.