The Java people will tell you (rightly or wrongly) that Java compiles to bytecode so that it's cross-platform. Which is still an effort to solve an N*M problem. There are other benefits to this, too (such as runtime optimization via JIT), but for the Java commmunity, at least, the primary goal seems to be cross-platform support. The difference between that and gcc's IL is when the compile to machine code is done.

Also, some compilers (like the gcc suite) support many languages, so we have to add another term to the equation: L*N*M, where L is the number of languages you want to support. Which just makes the use of an internal IL that much more important. Ignore that bit. Misread Abigail-II's post.