No, there aren't. There is an entrenched bureaucracy and a load of fanboys who can't see past what is to what could easily be, all attempting to justify the current sorry state of affairs or ignorant of what's what.
Look, if javascript, with all it's insanity, can be standardized across browsers, for the love of pete, a simple stack-based VM can be too. And then everyone can go to hell in their own way.
Admittedly, people will stop using Javascript the second there is a viable alternative. I regard that as a feature.
Ignore reality if you want to. It's just never going to happen. Java had its chance. Java had every possible chance. Java had the advantage of making a deal with Netscape to purposefully cripple javascript to help promote Java. Sun tried for a decade, trying and trying to make Java the defacto web application language. Sun tried and tried to put its java VM in the browsers. And it lost. Java lost. Javascript won. End game. Being in denial about it won't change it. Trying it again isn't going to change the undeniable reasons that Java did in fact lose. Insisting that a VM is the best way to make web apps won't change the reality that we explored for years and years that it just simply isn't. It didn't work. It can't work.
"If I wanted a safe intermediate form, I would look at arithmetic
coding techniques that self-verify (so that you can't express other
than well-formed programs), not bytecode and not JS source. It's IMHO
very unlikely that TC39 will standardize a bytecode for JS. An AST
encoding has better chances and better properties including self-
verification and view-source-ry."
