alt Hacker NewsJava has had native code compilers at very least since Excelsior JET exists, and there is a whole story of commercial offerings, before GraalVM and OpenJ9 come to be, so a moot point in 2026.
Likewise, .NET has had NGEN since day one even if with limitations, and after several detours in AOT approaches, NativeAOT is in the package and cross platform, thus also a moot point in 2026.
But again, they aren't cool for the kids today.
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I think you miss my point a bit. It's not about what can be done with those ecosystems in 2026 - you mentioned what was done in the 2000's, and I'm suggesting one reason that wasn't perceived as "cool" is because of the whole VM / overhead requirement. Maybe technologies for that existed then, but they certainly weren't being used much - every experience I remember with Java back then was "download this jar, now go and get yourself a JVM to run it".
And I do still think there is an advantage for this kind of tooling to choose languages that are designed to compile to a native binary. At best Java and C# are equivalent to Go and Rust here, maybe they are less "cool" but I don't see any reason why this rewrite would be better if it were to Java than Rust.
The point isn't "AOT", the point is an efficient, compiled binary. Acting like Java's AOT story is comparable to a native Rust binary is delusional.
And yes, both languages are considered "not cool" since they lean heavily into code structuring that the industry has largely moved past.