Would this be a good time to mention that a few years ago I wrote an experimental Java AOT compiler which worked by converting bytecode into C++? http://cowlar

Would this be a good time to mention that a few years ago I wrote an experimental Java AOT compiler which worked by converting bytecode into C++? http://cowlark.com/cowjac http://cowlark.com/cowjac I used Apache Harmony as the standard library, and binaries were about 2MB, which back in 2012 I considered unacceptably large; benchmarks were adequate only. I never got round to implementing a garbage collector but the hooks were in place for a simple mark/sweep stop-the-world collector. The hard part would be to actually make all threads of the program stop so they could be collected; I had a plan, but no implementation. Interested parties may also be interested in my experimental Java JIT which worked by converting bytecode into Lua and then running it with LuaJIT: http://cowlark.com/luje http://cowlark.com/luje It actually beat OpenJDK Server for some unrepresentative microbenchmarks. It's very unfinished, and generates fairly pathological Lua code which LuaJIT has trouble with, but the biggest problem is that Lua and LuaJIT can't do shared-memory threading, so most Java code won't work on it. (JVMs are surprisingly easy to write. If you're interested in interpreters or code generation, I encourage you to try it.) (Man, I completely forgot I wrote these until now!)