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Only by accident. It has terrible semantics for a target assembly.

The JIT in the JVM is not for Java, but for Java bytecode. That, along with the easy integration into existing Java classes, is what makes the JVM such an attractive target for things like Scala, Jython, and Clojure.

Java bytecode is pretty close to Java "the language." You can try decompiling some Java classes and see how close to the original you end up getting.

Because of that it's also a pretty awful assembly target, something which is only now being addressed with things like invokedynamic, finally moving Java byte code beyond Java 'the language.'

I don't know. No matter how often I hear/see this, I just can't plausibly believe it. I think there are a lot of things missing to make JS a plausible Javacript.

For this reason I kinda want Dart to succeed. Why not make the browser truly polyglot if we are trying replace OS with browsers?