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It's not just about portability, but also things like dynamic loading and runtime modification of code, which modern systems rely on quite a lot under the hood.

People often aren't aware of this because the actual mechanisms tend to be hidden inside libraries or tools they depend on.

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> dynamic loading and runtime modification of code, which modern systems rely on quite a lot under the hood

Can you provide any example? I can't think of any and it sounds very interesting since you seem to be implying that it's common. I assume that "dynamic loading" means something more sophisticated than loading a dynamic library at run-time?

Dynamically generated code, e.g. proxy classes and aspect pointcuts being inserted into code and then recompiled by the JIT.

And even "just" dynamically loading a library requires recompilation because it will invalidate optimizer assumptions such as devirtualization (part of class hierarchy analysis in hotspot).

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