[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.