> It's already been tried several times... and unless the big 3 browser makers (google, mozilla and ms) all support a given approach it just won't happen. Has

> It's already been tried several times... and unless the big 3 browser makers (google, mozilla and ms) all support a given approach it just won't happen. Has it really been tried though? I've never seen more than a few half assed attempts without all parties involved. I've love to see them come together to work something like this out; the web as it exists today isn't nearly as snappy or nice as native apps so I feel like something will eventually change here. Whether that's the help of a bytecode implementation or something else I'm not sure. > And even using a common bytecode, there will still be a compile step which is separate from the source, and requires mapping to be able to associate the bytecode to the source with the same potential for bugs you are complaining about. Yes there is always potential for compilation to introduce bugs but compiling into a bytecode is vasty different from compiling into JavaScript. JavaScript is a functional language with a lot of quirks; Java bytecode and .Net's MSIL, for comparison, are very raw and fast with as few features as possible. It's significantly better to compile into some form of bytecode for later execution than compiling into another human-readable language.