[pjmlp]

.NET has had lot of innovation, AOT was there since the beginning via NGEN, although there was never a big investment in its optimizing capabilities.

Then there was Axum, Cω, Phoenix Compiler (LLVM like in .NET), Singularity, Midori, Rosylin, MDIL, .NET Native.

GraalVM goes back to MaximeVM and JikesRVM, so JIT in Java is also quite old.

What all these projects need is the money and political willigness to keep driving them forward, and here is probably the main issue with some .NET research projects, because since the begging Windows Development (which kind of owns the C and C++ story) teams aren't that willing into having too much .NET on their turf.