JavaScript is very relevant because there is tons of legacy code that has to run equally as fast in this new bytecode VM as it runs today under the various engi

JavaScript is very relevant because there is tons of legacy code that has to run equally as fast in this new bytecode VM as it runs today under the various engines. The choice of VM comes down to how well it works with dynamic languages. JVM and CLR are both modeled after statically typed languages. Microsoft spent quite a bit of money trying to put JavaScript on top of .NET but finally gave up, and today it places it's IE platform on equal footing with .NET.