[Xcelerate]

I really like this idea of compiling code to Javascript. Brenden Eich makes some good points for it in his series of slides (starting here: http://brendaneich.github.com/Strange-Loop-2012/#/21).

I'm working on a little programming language myself that compiles to Javascript. In most languages that do this, I wish there was better information on the mapping between the domain language and its Javascript codomain. I think this would be a good open source project idea: a tool to assist in the compilation of various languages to Javascript. Something to the effect of how source lines in C can be printed above their generated assembly. Anyone want to give it a shot?

[spacemanaki]

I think what you've described would be mostly accomplished by source maps: http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/developertools/source...

[slurgfest]

Why is it not possible to engineer a basic VM to do this job from the start, rather than retrofitting Javascript to act as a bytecode?

[adrusi]

implementing a vm in javascript would be noticeably slower than compiling directly to javascript. Dart has its own vm, which will eventually be bundled with chrome since it's a google-backed project, but for backwards compatibility it still needs a dart source to javascript source compiler.