> That most of the web (and obviously Flash is the exception to this) is text based is not an accident. Browsers and people are not the only thing reading the web - there are crawlers and other tools doing this, that and the other. Search engine crawlers for example go into the javascript and extract links.

I can see how that is important for the strings in the code but I'm not aware of many use cases for crawling the actual javascript code.

>Also I really don't think you have thought it through as a developer - its bad enough debugging stuff in browser without it being compiled and only having basically machine code to look at.

If I want to debug javascript I need Firebug or Chrome's tools and those can very well have support for a standard debugger.

>but expecting the browser to ship with several languages in it doesn't appeal to anyone either (and I know you just want a few byte code runtimes

I just want one standard bytecode runtime. I can ship and have the user cache whatever runtime I need.

> but I cannot see how that would work while still maintaining all the richness and complexity of the web as it stands)

I still don't see what web richness is there to be had inside the <script> tag. Seems to me all the uses of it that aren't simply execution are marginal at best.

>anyway - I think if there was any appetite to do anything about this problem it would have been done by now. There were people grumbling about it 10 years ago and I've seen a number of projects to add languages come and go.

It seems to have been enough of a problem for google to have built GWT. I wonder why they haven't shipped a Dalvik VM in Chrome and have their GWT apps target the VM on Android and Chrome and Javascript for everyone else. Is V8 execution these days comparable to a good JVM/CLR?