This sounds like it is just a modern gcj, then. Am I reading it wrong?
My question is really "why will it succeed this time?" Did GCJ and similar technologies not take off because Sun didn't support them? Or because it is a really neat technical challenge that solves a problem people don't actually care about?
So, yes, this is cool. But, I'm currently giving it a likelihood of success really low, since I have priors that failed. What other evidence are people seeing that make this something to be excited about, as opposed to just impressed. (Or, are we just impressed and I can go back to my corner?)
Sun was religious against it.
Regarding the GCJ, it failed because it is a hard problem where people didn't work for free and most of them stopped working on it when the OpenJDK was released.
While others read newspapers on the train, I read papers. :)
In any case, these provide AOT.
JamaicaVM, PTC Perc (former Atego and Aonix), IBM J9, Oracle Embedded Java, OS/400 Java (uses the same bytecode deployment as the other OS/400 languages), Excelsior JET, and probably a few others in embedded market that I am not aware of.
And of course the Android Java fork with ART.