I don't think it's that badly designed. JVM bytecode is not much more than AST serialization, a post-order traversal of expression trees. It's designed for veri

I don't think it's that badly designed. JVM bytecode is not much more than AST serialization, a post-order traversal of expression trees. It's designed for verification - every control flow needs the same typed stack - rather than speed of interpretation, though it's easy to write an interpreter. It's zipped, so it doesn't need to be optimized for space. I didn't like how it did exceptions, that seemed a bit too much like its own little mini VM. JSR/RET etc, return addresses on the operand stack. But that's gone now.