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Wouldn't writing an interpreter for each platform be less work and achieve the same goal as writing a VM for each platform?

Edit: ^Aside from being able to execute the bytecode on any platform

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Why would it be less work? The interpreter will need to implement whatever operations a VM can perform, so a priori it's at least as much work. Bonus, if you can bootstrap the source->bytecode process, then you only need to write (and compile) that once to get a full-fledged interpreter on every host with a VM

As others mentioned, source code should be distributed that way, and I think creating a simple VM is easier than a simple language parser. But of course, an optimizing one can be really quite complex in both cases.

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