The follow-on question to an ask like that is nominally a variation on "So, what would that enable you to do?" From there, I can then start digging into what t

The follow-on question to an ask like that is nominally a variation on "So, what would that enable you to do?" From there, I can then start digging into what the real problem is. Maybe it was a desire for greater performance, or easier deployability. Maybe his concern was about protecting intellectual property, and he thought that binaries would be harder to reverse-engineer than bytecode. All of those could be legitimate problems, and none of them would really be solved by a Java-to-native compiler.