Kind of. If you fully understand Microsoft's portfolio it makes more sense. Desktop Windows 8 is a scenario, but not a very good representative. While 64-bit

Kind of. If you fully understand Microsoft's portfolio it makes more sense. Desktop Windows 8 is a scenario, but not a very good representative. While 64-bit JIT time can take a while and CLR startup time can be really long, both of these things can be addressed in a variety of ways in vanilla Windows machines, ranging from NGen improvements to CLR pre-loading strategies. The real killer is alternate platforms. Every time you JIT in a mobile device it wastes time, CPU power, and battery life, all of which are much more limited than in a desktop machine. CLR startup can be mitigated somewhat, but resident memory is an especially precious commodity on mobile. The last real kicker is that security concerns mean that many platforms (XBox) mark a lot of their pages as NX, making JIT-ing in these pages very difficult or impossible. Moreover, better security infrastructure means doing this on more platforms more of the time, so this will become increasingly problematic. All together, this makes a very compelling case for AOT compilation.