Or just pay for one of the commercial JDKs that have been around with AOT and JIT caches support, like JRockit or IBM in the pre-OpenJ9 days.

All this Java in Java, that traces back to Maxime and Rikes is cool for compiler nerds, and we get to have free beer AOT/JIT caches as well.

Green fielding on a new language is really not an option for the vast majority of software. To that point you are not really a target user for this if you can just up and switch stacks like that.

This isn't a defense of greenfield -- my point is that if we haven't had a need for AOT for the past ten years, we don't have one now. I imagine 99% of big Java apps are in a similar position. Getting a legacy Java app to compile AOT isn't trivial either.

Let alone that almost no other language has the JVM ecosystem.

Most of the JVM ecosystem doesn't work with AOT due to issues with reflection.

"Most" is a bit hyperbolic, and reflection can be supported in the VM for AOT code, as evidenced by the Android Runtime (pre-JIT).

Yet commercial Java vendors with AOT tooling have been in business since around 2000, so plenty of projects do just fine.

Good thing espresso can support both!