&gt;<i>This also helped killing the Java role on the desktop and together with Microsoft, started the industry cycle to move back into AOT compiled languages.</i><p>Well, it&#x27;s not like Java ever did much to win the Desktop. Swing was a horrible over-engineered mess, performance was crap until GC improved and CPUs caught on in the mid-late 00s, and the desktop saw mostly neglect from SUN.<p>&gt;<i>I wonder how it would have turned out if they had killed Objective-C instead</i><p>And have all OS X userland apps being written in Java? Probably Apple would have been dead.<p>Besides it&#x27;s not like they killed Java among protests from developers -- the majority of developers and users &quot;were quite happy to using Objective-C&quot; as you said.