The JVM is rather heavy weight and typically slow to start even when you do have enough resources to run it. That rules out edge computing. Graal AOT compilation is more similar but not a general purpose thing currently as it only works with tools and languages optimized for that.
I say this as a Kotlin/Java developer. I know and love the jvm but it's just not a lightweight option suitable for edge computing or serverless computing (it works but the jvm startup overhead + binary size is annoying).
Java has had AOT compilation support since around 2000, when commercial JDK vendors started supporting it, what it lacked was free beer AOT compilation, as GJC never really did it without issues and was quickly abandoned when OpenJDK came into the scene.
Isn't the JVM too high level for compiled languages without garbage collection? E.g. can I efficiently compile C to the JVM without asm.js-style hacks which degrade performance?
