Along with EVM, Parity has an experimental support for Web Assembly as a bytecode for contracts. Some advantages of Web Assembly (WASM for short) are:
- Standard is maintained by huge number of interested parties
- Much less 256-bit word size related overhead
- Much more languages that target WASM (see https://github.com/mbasso/awesome-wasm)
- Advanced optimisation tools for WASM->WASM