GraalVM's ahead of time compilation is not the sole competitor, most commercial JDKs do offer some kind of AOT support.

Yes, you often mention them, but nobody [1] uses those, whereas GraalVM, due to coming Oracle and eventually being some kind of default (itself, not the AOT option per se), might do better.

[1] Where nobody = roughly as many people use CL/Haskell in production, and in any case, not any number to write home about...

Apparently they have been in business since 2000's.

It bet that they have much more deployments in production than CL/Haskell, given the embedded space.

Probably, just wanting to take a jab at you :-)

My point really being that, yeah, JVM-AOT existed since forever, but they have always been niche in the grand scheme of things (especially since you need a commercial license for most, and in this industry, after 2000, that's almost a death kiss).

If Sun had bundled the same option and made it easy to use, it would be a whole different story.

Yeah the typical wanted to be payed, but not wanting to pay for the work of others.

Thankfully corporations business levels works a bit differently, hence the rise of dual licenses.