I want to be careful not to recapitulate every conversation I've ever had with a JVM person about this. I'm not claiming it's impossible to deploy JVM applications; obviously, tons of people do. I'm just saying people use Go and Rust because they work well in situations where you want to distribute and directly run a simple binary without additional tooling. That's not every situation; obviously, if you can use Docker, there's not much difference between a JVM app and any other kind.
Your comment is super interesting, don't let me sound like I'm trying to shoot it down. I'm being deliberately terse to avoid creating receptors for language war antigens to bind to.
Sure. Given the choice of one file or 50, one file is clearly better all other things being equal.
My feelings on this changed over time. About 10-15 years ago I thought single executable output was a critical feature for a language, because everywhere I went I saw people saying how important it was for them, how much simpler it made deployment. I figured, OK, people know what they want so that's what they should get.
Then Docker came along. Docker images aren't single files, they're the polar opposite. They aren't even things you directly manipulate using the filesystem at all. Yet people loved it and it took over the world. Clearly what all those people demanding single-file executables were actually wanting in 95% of cases was simpler deployment, and they were phrasing it as single executable because that was concrete and understandable whereas simpler deployment is a very vague concept so who knows what you'd get if you asked for it.
For people who are selecting Go or Rust or Graal native images primarily because of single-file output, I'd actually really appreciate a chance to ask a few questions or interview them quickly to learn more about the deployment context. Conveyor is all about deployment and it's good to understand more about how people are doing things and what could be better.
Your comment is super interesting, don't let me sound like I'm trying to shoot it down. I'm being deliberately terse to avoid creating receptors for language war antigens to bind to.