I think both are important. My real hope, in the long term, is that people will package source in the recomputable VM, and recompile it as part of the recomputa

I think both are important. My real hope, in the long term, is that people will package source in the recomputable VM, and recompile it as part of the recomputation. However, particularly when academics are gluing together multiple pieces of software, often which are themselves quite fragile, just trying to reassemble working software can be almost impossible. I have a number of things I wrote myself from when C++11 was first coming out (yes, I possibly shouldn't write software with compilers for unfinished languages, but I like to live on the state of the art). Now C++11 support in gcc is finalised and some corners have been cleaned up, these programs don't compile any more. I know how to fix them, and have. I wouldn't want someone else to have to do that.