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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

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pjmlp·

> They also produce binaries which don't necessarily require a runtime to be available on every server

Just like Java[0]. It is just a matter of choosing the right compiler for the use case at hand.

[0] - http://www.excelsiorjet.com/ (one from many vendors)

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Cool concept, I didn't realise this existed. Can you run Hadoop and friends under this? I've worked at companies with over 500 servers in a Hadoop cluster and literally never once heard about anything other than using Oracle's JRE aside from one proposal to use OpenJDK which was shot down pretty quickly.

I don't have experience with Hadoop.

Almost all commercial JVMs have some form of AOT or JIT caching, specially those that target embedded systems.

Sun never added support to the reference JVM for political reasons, as they would rather push for plain JIT.

Oracle is now finally thinking about adding support for it, with no official statement if it will make it into 9 or later.

JEP 197 is the start of those changes, http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/197

Oracle Labs also has SubstrateVM, which is an AOT compiler built with Graal and Truffle.

Way back in the day, GCC's gcj compiler would do AOT compilation of Java, however I believe it stopped being developed at jdk5 support.

If I am not mistaken most the developers abandoned the project to work on the Eclipse compiler and OpenJDK when those projects became available.

GCC only keeps gcj around due to its unit tests.

There's also things like exec4j which bundles everything including a JVM into an executable which one can just run... and things like AdvancedInstaller and Install4j will also allow one to bundle a JVM.

So producing a binary which doesn't require a separate runtime really isn't a problem.

Since you mention it, Java 8 brings bundling and installers support into the reference JDK.

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