[jart]

How useful is that though, for liberating and expropriating binaries? That things got to be at least several megabytes. If I used that as an interpreter or shell script prefix hack then I'd feel like an ant riding on the JVM's coattails.

That's one of the reasons I wrote APE. The bootloader shell script prefix is only 12kb so you can write a small program and it'll feel like it's actually your program. When you distribute it to your friends (respecting their time not asking them to become build system experts, just to try the cool thing you've written) you'll find that APE lets it run on seven operating systems too and most importantly, it'll just feel like something you've written, and that is yours, rather than, "hey grandma install oracle java first, here's how to remove the toolbar" kind of things where you're just evangelizing someone else's platform.