It has existed for 20 years, and already started with Sun.
Having AOT compilers as commercial offerings, was seen as one way to capture value in the Java market, in a culture where most compilers were still commercial, GCC being the exception.
>It has existed for 20 years, and already started with Sun.
In an anemic way, with mostly third party offerings few people know or care about, and various degrees of pain and shortcoming to their use. It should be a first class feature, and as simple to use as is in Go (including for cross compiling).
In general, if something exists in "some form" for 30+ years in a language, and only a handful of people use it, whereas in another it's used all the time and people from other languages are jealous of how well it works, then the formers "some form" is not a good one.
Having AOT compilers as commercial offerings, was seen as one way to capture value in the Java market, in a culture where most compilers were still commercial, GCC being the exception.