> Alchemy

Yep, that's the name. There was a brief period in late 2000s when Adobe was pushing hard to make Flash embedded into web ecosystem. They made Air as a way to package Web or Flash code into a desktop app. Essentially it was Electron-before-Electron. Alchemy was a part of this grand plan to be able to integrate existing native libraries with Flash code. The plan was like you said to compile to Flash bytecode, and AFAIK it never went further than a tech demo.

This whole ecosystem turned into a slow train-wreck over approximately 5-year period. Adobe really saw themselves as future stewards of web technology. They donated their ActionScript VM and a JIT to Mozilla and hoped that Firefox would become the first browser with fast JavaScript engine. Google developed Chrome and V8 in secret and managed to release their fast browser early. Microsoft and Yahoo sabotaged adoption of ActionScript dialect as at the next JavaScript. And at the same time Apple went fully anti-plugins, and with the rise of iPhone both Flash and silverlight died off.

Years later Java folks tried to build their own version of Alchemy as part of GraalVM. The project was called Sulong and was using Graal to execute and JIT LLMV bitcode. TruffleRuby was supposed to be a primary early beneficiary to be able to compile and run Ruby native extensions. This was during the period of a race between several JIT solutions in hopes to become "the next Ruby", and Truffle team (along with IBM's OMR) lost the race first to MJIT and then to YJIT. Graal itself seems to loosing steam, because their multi-language VM never got enough adoption among Java, Node, or Ruby people, and the VM itself tended to use too much RAM in era when RAM became premium in the cloud.

Graal was never designed as OpenJDK replacement, it is the evolution of MaximeVM, and their main customers, meaning who pays the team salaries are the Oracle database and cloud teams.

In that regard they are doing pretty well.

Plus all the folks that never paid for ExcelsiorJET, JRockit, PTC, Aicas, and many others of which only PTC and Aicas survive, now have in Graal their gratis AOT compiler.

Alongside OpenJ9 (which is more like what Leyden is trying to be), and the one on the box shipped alongside ART.

Ruby on top of JVM has a few interwined stories since the days Sun embraced it on Netbeans, and it suffers from the same issues as PyPy regarding adoption, it suffices not to be 100% compatible with whatever crazy extensions written in C exist out there.

Microsoft was probably more clever giving up on IronPython and IronRuby, and keeping the DLR infrastructure.