>the hassle involved in setup and debugging, and the perceived inefficiency scare most developers away. Hmm, I don't see why there should be any hassle in setu

>the hassle involved in setup and debugging, and the perceived inefficiency scare most developers away. Hmm, I don't see why there should be any hassle in setup an debugging. You need tooling to do that automatically, and the tooling is almost there (although it still requires a bit of manual wiring, but it's only a question of time). Browsers already compile this .js code to run at near native speeds, and modern browsers support debugging compiled code reasonably well. There are still significant areas to improve, of course. In fact, you can treat "compile-to-JavaScript" as a form of VM "scriptcode".