I read somewhere that it was a religious issue not providing AOT compilation.<p>It always saddned me not to have this option in the reference JDK, only on commercial JDKs.<p>Whereas we already had Java like safe languages with Eiffel, Oberon and Modula-3 compiling AOT to native code, and with JIT also available before 1996.<p>Oh and with value types and proper generics as well.<p>Now maybe Java 10 will become what Java 1.0 should have been.