It doesn't actually work on (GUI) OSes - there is a strong incentive to write your app in the language and framework that is native to the platform, because you're asking for a lot of pain and a substandard customer experience otherwise. You write your Windows apps in C# and .NET. You write your Android apps in Java. You write your iOS apps in Objective-C, and now Swift. You write your Gnome apps in C with Gtk+, and your KDE apps in C++ with Qt, and your Eclipse plugins in Java with SWT, and your Emacs extensions in Emacs Lisp. In all these cases (except Apple), you can write your apps in a different language, but virtually nobody does, because you end up fighting the platform.

Servers and command-line tools are an exception because your interaction with the host platform is limited to a few dozen syscalls that can be easily bound to a number of different languages. Not so with most GUI software.