There's the rub, I think. Historically the big managed platforms have offered some real advantages. JIT compilation has been a part of that, since it helps to

There's the rub, I think. Historically the big managed platforms have offered some real advantages. JIT compilation has been a part of that, since it helps to some of the reflective features that have in turn supported some useful tools for increasing developer productivity such as aspect-oriented programming, object-relational mapping and mocking. These gains may have come at the cost of raw execution times, but most of the core consumers of the technology measure their success in terms of dollars, and are in the privileged position of being able to offset the performance losses by upgrading their servers. For them this is a perfectly sensible decision. Developers are much more expensive than computers, so they were simply being pound wise and penny foolish. In other environments the calculus has been different. Console games have always had constrained resources, a homogeneous target environment, and high performance demands. Correspondingly, AOT's always been how things are done int hat domain. Sometimes it's even changed over time. Bytecode made a lot of sense for mobile development a decade ago, back when there were relatively many competing hardware platforms and people interacted with their phones differently. Nowadays there are fewer more homogeneous platforms and do more task switching, so the cost of AOT compilation has gone down and the potential benefits have gone up. Hence this shift in .NET, which perhaps seems even more sudden since .NET itself was primarily targeted at enterprise development until relatively recently.