To answer the question posed in the title: because it&#x27;s hard and the people with those skills are already getting paid to do it. It&#x27;s also the answer to why there&#x27;s no free software that&#x27;s as good as Photoshop.<p>As others have said, the JVM has been a popular runtime target for the last few years. But it&#x27;s been in constant development for a quarter century, and it powers countless enterprise systems, so the amount of time and resources that have gone into it are enormous. It&#x27;s hard to get that level of investment in <i>any</i> software, period.