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Julia only does partial AOT, it still bundles the sysimage (~100MB+ of runtime, what I refer to in my above comment as the VM snapshot) c.f. https://docs.juliahub.com/PackageCompiler/MMV8C/1.2.7/devdoc...

Traditional AOT like you see in C/C++/Rust/Go/Zig would be able to treeshake and eliminate redundant codepaths, the binaries are all fairly small with minimal startup overhead.

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Makes sense, thanks, I don't know much about Julia.

Another counterexample to AOT compilation being a feature of application languages is Java and C# -- both are clearly application languages, with strong focus and presence there, but both are interpreted. Although I can argue that it depends on the terminology regarding "compile", whether transpilation to .class bytecode can be called compilation (and everyone do call it "compilation", but if it really was, there would be no point in real AOT compilers for Java/C#).

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