As far as I know, Truffle is able to do some absolutely incredible compile-time optimizations —- reaching deeply into what we would normally regard as strictly semantic territory.

(For an example, see some of the optimizations done by TruffleRuby for things like `myArray.sort.first` - which it apparently optimizes by terminating the sort as soon as the first element is sorted to the front of the array... and all that without any special hints in the standard library. Please correct me if I’m wrong... it’s been a few years since I’ve read in depth about TruffleRuby. And granted this example isn’t Java, but I imagine there are great parallels there.)