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>We spent a long time wishing for a VM for the web that could be targetted by any language and being told that wasn't possible.

Technologically speaking, this has been possible since the days of p-code. The browser vendors have only just decided that it's something that's actually beneficial

It's also been possible since Javascript.

Same organizations, different people, and enough time to experiment with (read: suffer pains from) things like asm.js and PNaCl for those people to agree that something like WebAssembly was a good idea.

It's called the CLR. (Common language runtime, which is what C# runs on.)

The problem is that the CLR forces you into a "one-size-fits-all" garbage collector. It's good for what it does, but if your application needs are different, than the CLR just won't work.

There are plenty of VMs out there, the JVM and CLR being the biggest two. Up to now though none were usable on the web.