> Well, the Dart VM is not like adding a backend to a compiler or VM - it is a complete VM in itself. My straw-man idea was not to add the Dart VM to the brows

> Well, the Dart VM is not like adding a backend to a compiler or VM - it is a complete VM in itself. My straw-man idea was not to add the Dart VM to the browser, it was to add a Dart-to-asm.js compiler to the browser, as an AOT compilation step. This would not involve integrating the VM at all. > It might not be practical for other browsers to adopt such a technology. Given that there are at least three completely independent and highly competitive JavaScript JIT-compiling VMs from a variety of different browser vendors, I find this unlikely. I think we are four levels into hypotheticals here. If every technical advance was rejected due to something bad that might happen four steps down the road, nothing would ever improve. We surely never would have gotten JavaScript. That could have gone badly in tons of different ways (especially since, as the first execution engine in a browser, there was no backward-compatibility strategy). Who would have believed in 1995 that 15 years later this technology would have gotten pushed so far, and that the competition would be so healthy? > So if Google sites force the Dart VM to be necessary to compete, that would basically mean that the other browsers cannot compete. Then there would be just Chrome, a single implementation of a web browser, dominating the market like IE used to. The entire web platform is standardized (including Dart, which is standards-track). I would challenge you to name a standardized technology with a market comparable to the web in which one vendor is so dominant that all of the other competitors are defeated and it becomes a monoculture, despite a large demand. If anything, I think the prospect of a web that cannot keep up with other application technologies far more likely and troubling.