If you have the money, there are lots of commercial JVMs with compilers to native code.
There are quite a few open source ones, but they aren't as stable.
As always, Language != Implementation.
There are quite a few open source ones, but they aren't as stable.
As always, Language != Implementation.
Language == Thought-space >= Implementation,
Excelsior JET is the most well known one.
Oracle actually also supports AOT but only on embedded systems, with the commercial JDK.
Avian is a JIT compiling JVM but one which is much smaller than HotSpot. It has a mode where it statically links your JAR into the binary itself, so you get a single self contained executable. With ProGuard and other optimisations like LZMA compression built in, such binaries can be remarkably small. Try their example:
https://readytalk.github.io/avian/#-xamples
It's a full blown GUI app that demonstrates the full range of widgets available, is cross platform, and yet is only about 1mb in size.
Usually this means iOS and the ARM processor type but RoboVM is also capable of generating code for Mac OS X and Linux running on x86 CPUs. [0]
There are several forks of the latest open-source version of RoboVM. This one in particular is targeting desktop/server usage:
https://github.com/ashleyj/aura