There used to be an initiative called ANDF (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_Neutral_Distribution_Format http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_Neut

There used to be an initiative called ANDF (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_Neutral_Distribution_Format http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_Neutral_Distributi...) which was designed to distribute software in some form of intermediate level code. They got compiled to native code on the user's machine. I guess you could think of LLVM object files as the equivalent today.