This becomes even more complex in the case of java, at least I'm the most familiar with java. And yes, at work, we are distributing jar/war-files built on linux

This becomes even more complex in the case of java, at least I'm the most familiar with java. And yes, at work, we are distributing jar/war-files built on linux to linux and windows targets, and back in the day to solaris as well. BSD has been prototyped as well on a late friday night. That was funny. However, you could use gcj (for java < 1.4? Not sure) to create standalone systems. And apparently, you can throw java at LLVM to get runnable binaries. So maybe java doesn't even need a runtime? And on the other hand, once JNA/JNI comes into play, portability of jar files becomes ... interesting. This is similar to the usual hell of python with C dependencies. All in all, I don't understand the criteria from the article enough to evaluate that knowledge into a statement.