.NET always had AOT compilation from day 1, and now has .NET Native, which is the same backend as Visual C++.
It had forks being used to write Singularity and Midori, and official support for unsafe code if performance required it to, including ways to manually manage memory.
The CLR has native APIs for IL rewriting engines, via the profiler native API.
Supports value types, SIMD, and the roadmap to C# 8.0 will be adding more features bringing C# low level capabilities closer to C++.
Java will be getting some of these goodies as per Java Language Summit 2017, but they are all targeting Java 10 or later, while .NET is delivering them on 2017.
Re:Announcing .NET Core 2.0
by JamesBarney on Friday August 18, 2017 @01:00PM
(#15047849)
It was my understanding that it was hard to compare the JVM and the CLR in terms of performance. But I'd always heard that the CLR was faster because of support for true generics, unsafe code, and value types.
I'm really interested in this, mind going into a bit more details?
C# has been superior to Java, as a language, for quite a long time (IMHO) and likely always will be. The libraries, well, I don't know. Pretty similar I guess.
The thing to consider about programming languages is there's no way to make money from them anymore. That means they're either loss leaders for some other product (Swift : iOS, C# : Windows), the result of academic research (Scala, Haskell, etc), one man's personal quest to redefine coding (Clojure, Groovy, Ruby), or the result of a company attempting to optimise its own processes or products (Go, JavaScript, Kotlin). Oh yes. And then there's C++ which defies categorisation :-)
So now you look at the categories above and what do you observe? That a lot of the developers will be essentially hobbyist in nature, or working on products that are often used on UNIX. These people will want to build on a cross platform runtime. Until recently .NET was not cross platform.
JVM bytecode is also a bit simpler than .NET bytecode and has better support for dynamic languages. Many languages are dynamic.