[jnbridge]

One thing that's undervalued about the MS stack in 2026: the interop story. Many teams don't get to choose one stack — they inherit both Java and .NET from acquisitions, vendor integrations, or just different teams making independent choices over the years.

.NET 9's improvements to Native AOT, Dynamic PGO, and container support have made it a genuinely competitive backend choice on its own merits. But the strongest real-world argument for choosing .NET is when you already have Java in the mix and need both to coexist. The tooling for bridging the two ecosystems has matured significantly — shared memory bridges can do sub-millisecond cross-runtime calls, and both Java 21's virtual threads and .NET's async model handle high-concurrency integration well.

If you're truly greenfield with no constraints, pick whichever ecosystem your team knows best. The performance gap between .NET and JVM stacks is negligible in 2026. But if there's even a chance you'll need to integrate with Java libraries or services later, having .NET in the picture gives you options that Go/Rust/Node don't offer as smoothly.