Performance gains of GraalVM's AOT are drastically reduced startup time (1 ms for my Java/Kotlin command-line applications), elimination of JIT warmup time, and reduced memory footprint. For peak performance of a language as dynamic as Java, a JIT is hard to beat. Profile-guided optimizations will narrow the gap but are only available in GraalVM Enterprise Edition. Native executables also have a less sophisticated GC than HotSpot.