I've thought along similar lines a lot recently, and I think you end up wanting something like WASM, but without all the design-by-committee that comes with tha

I've thought along similar lines a lot recently, and I think you end up wanting something like WASM, but without all the design-by-committee that comes with that. Specifically, ditch the parametric instructions, add arbitrary bit-width ints, multiple memories, a way to allocate and free memories, and hints[0]; and make the binary format simpler to parse by removing the completely unnecessary integer compression. [0] by which I mean the ability to tag functions and variables with an indication of what they're used for so the interpreter/jit is able to replace them with an efficient implementation if one is known to it. For instance, you possibly don't even need float types, just have routines for doing soft-float arithmetic tagged such that the interpreter knows they implement IEEE floating point operations that the processor may be able to handle on its own.