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Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, if you are reading it as "no big accomplishment", yeah, not right.

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?)

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Almost all commercial JDKs support AOT to native code.

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.

Do you know if any commercial JDKs release any metrics on the use of this?

Unfortunately no, I am aware of them, because as language geek I like to research these subjects.

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.

Awesome, thanks for responding. I have the same hobby of reading up on this sort of stuff, so I knew of quite a few of those. Just don't know of much for a use case of them.

I think the big distinguishing feature is that this is first-class support built into the platform, so it will likely have many more users than previous efforts. I don't anticipate it being generally useful until at least JDK11, though.

I had thought Sun did back one of the early methods of compiling to native. (Pretty sure my memory is just wrong.)

Sun only supported it on bare metal embedded scenarios, they were religiously against it.

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