I think higher level languages built on top of the JVM or .Net are very compelling because of the intersection of painless backwards compatibility and higher le

I think higher level languages built on top of the JVM or .Net are very compelling because of the intersection of painless backwards compatibility and higher level constructs. Building bindings to higher level languages is usually a pain, and by working directly with those virtual machines you eliminate that. Compiling from one language to another works better if you are going from a higher level language to a lower one, so machine code to JVM is probably not going to work very well but JVM to MIPS is not that hard.