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You can ship native binaries with Java, it is only a matter of getting the right toolchain for it.

Java is not only OpenJDK.

Jars are also just zip files, so you can prepend a shell script without impacting the ability for Java/zip to decompress. Add a shell script to run Java on its self and you have a executable (though not a true native elf/mach binary).

It’s not much worse than a standard dynamically linked binary at that point. You just need a JVM on the system. Combined with the AOT compiler (as it stabilizes) makes Java applications more competitive with standard binaries.

The sbt module I'm using for creating JARs (sbt-assembly) has this feature and I really like how seamless it makes creating executable JARs. I used it in a couple cases to create artifacts/executables for research projects that can be easily run and without many dependencies, usually just a recent enough JVM.

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