alt Hacker NewsThe slight drawback is that AOT compiled Java code's performance isn't as good as the JIT compiled form running on the JVM.
There's a reason why folks keep coming back to JIT compilation. It's hard to beat the value that can be gained from actually gathering data on how the code is actually used, which leads to a whole set of potential optimisations (which is the problem Profile Guided Optimisation attempts to solve for AOT compiled code.) The JVM is arguably one of the most advanced and capable JITing runtimes.
As with anything it's a trade off. Fast start times, pretty fast running (I think maybe less memory usage?); vs the full JIT speed you can get on the JVM at the cost of start-up speed and memory consumption. All depends on what you want to use the application for.
If you're talking something like a serverless function, go native. If you're talking production server where you're measuring runtime in more than dozens of minutes, probably better to stick to the JVM & JIT.
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Depends on how much effort, like on C and C++, you are willing to put into PGO metadata for the compiler and linker.
Full agreement with everything you said. Just one detail to add on serverless (and potentially in a scheduled environment like k8s), startup time can be an order of magnitude or more faster in a native build. For instance, I have some quarkus applications that can take 10 seconds to ready running via the jre that take 10ms or less to start as a graalvm built binary.