| Java has been there for years as well. AOT compilation has existed for about 20 years, it only happened to be a commercial product, Excelsior JET, Aonix, PTC, Aicas, are some examples. What GraalVM, OpenJ9 bring to the table is free beer AOT compilers, and in GraalVM's case, a LLVM like compiler framework that doesn't exist at all in .NET land. They also have the advantage of using agents to gather the required reflection data, instead of forcing an ecosystem split of having to rewrite existing libraries to make them AOT ready. There was the Phoenix project from Microsoft Research, which had the goal to replace Visual Studio infrastructure with a CLI based compiler toolchain, but unfortunely that project failed to gain traction within Microsoft. Shipping runtimes, which .NET Core introduced for .NET, has been a thing in Java land since they exist. There is also the ability to create single executables, coupled with jlink and jpackage. Besides OpenJDK offerings, there is a richness of JVM implementations, each to those having other capabilities, like OpenJ9 and Azul with their distributed JIT compiler for example. .NET is great and I prefer .NET to Java consulting projects when given the option, however it is no accident that Microsoft has decided to become again a Java vendor as well. |