Oracle Formally Proposes That Java Adopt Ahead-of-Time Compilation (infoworld.com)

An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes InfoWorld: Java applications will get faster startup times thanks to a formal proposal to include ahead-of-time compilation in the platform. The draft Java Development Kit proposal, authored by Vladimir Kozlov, principal technical staff member at Oracle, is targeted for inclusion in Java 9, which is expected to be available next summer. "We would love to see this make it into JDK 9, but that will of course depend on the outcome of the OpenJDK process for this JDK Enhancement Proposal," said Georges Saab, vice president of software development in the Java platform group at Oracle, on Thursday. Ahead-of-time compilation has been a stated goal for Java 9 to address the issue of slow startup...

The proposal summary notes that Java classes would be compiled to native code prior to launching the virtual machine. The ultimate goal is to improve the startup time of small or large Java applications while having "at most" a limited impact on peak performance and minimizing changes to the user workflow.
Tests indicates some applications perform better while some actually perform worse, so it's being proposed as an opt-in feature where dissatisfied users "can just rebuild a new JDK without ahead-of-time libraries."

Comments

Only makes sense for niches

[angel'o'sphere]

Penty of Enterprise software relies on byte code morphing/instrumentation and all things we get from Aspect Oriented Programming. Ahead of time compilation makes only sense in Applications that don't use such featers and should be simply part of the build process if developrs chose so and not necessarily a "language feature".
After all there are plenty of third party AoT Conpilers for the JVM.

Garbage

[speedplane]

I wish they'd spend more time on improving their garbage collectors than compilation time. It can take 30 seconds to a minute to garbage collect 25GB of memory, a huge problem for servers. The G1 garbage collector (G1GC) is promising, but it's still far to buggy to use in production. If this GC issue does not get fixed, I could see it incentivizing server software to switch to C/C++.