I wonder where we’d be if the idea of CPU-independent bytecode had ever really taken off - for example, the TIMI bytecode of IBM System/38 and AS/400, TenDRA TDF (aka OSF ANDF), WebAssembly. You could have an AOT compiler in the system firmware which the OS invokes, when a program is installed the OS uses AOT to convert it to the actual machine code, about which the OS might know nothing, and could vary incompatibly from CPU to CPU, even among different CPU models in the same family. (Maybe a JIT mode too.)
I guess JVM/CIL are somewhat similar, but at a much higher level - I’m not talking about garbage collection or type safety.
In some ways that is true of TIMI too - it is designed to support a capability-based operating system, and hence has some rather high-level instructions, although still not as high level as JVM/CIL - it was generally used as a compilation target for non-garbage collected languages such as RPG, COBOL, C/C++, PL/I, Fortran, BASIC, Pascal, etc - and hence lacks a garbage collector.
I guess JVM/CIL are somewhat similar, but at a much higher level - I’m not talking about garbage collection or type safety.
In some ways that is true of TIMI too - it is designed to support a capability-based operating system, and hence has some rather high-level instructions, although still not as high level as JVM/CIL - it was generally used as a compilation target for non-garbage collected languages such as RPG, COBOL, C/C++, PL/I, Fortran, BASIC, Pascal, etc - and hence lacks a garbage collector.