If you ask any random programmer if "Java runs on x86", 99% of them will say either "yes" or "I don't know what x86 is". Similarly, if you ask them "does Kotlin run on the SPARC architecture", they'll say "I don't know" and, if you give them some time to find [1], they'll amend to "no".
To be precise: the meaning being used by most programmers (and here) is "either the compiled binaries, the virtual machine, or the interpreter runs directly on the given architecture" - which clearly excludes MIT Scheme running on Rosetta, just as (to take a less controversial example) the fact that might be able to run the JVM on qemu on SPARC doesn't mean that the JVM runs on SPARC.
Thinking about the various levels of abstraction of VM's and interpreters is a fun exercise in general, but I don't think it's constructive in this particular situation.
For Scala, there is, separately, Scala Native. [2]
Both have ahead-of-time (AOT) compilers that compile down to the target architecture.
[1] https://www.graalvm.org/reference-manual/native-image/ [2] https://github.com/scala-native/scala-native
Where is this coming from? What about the literal thousands and thousands of programs on your OS right now? Or the thousands of systems that power large corporations that predate JavaScript popularity?
Sure the language is popular right now, but software development has a much longer history than the last 10 years
Yes [1].
