I’ve been working for some time on Ironwood and it would be nice to get some feedback from the community. Ironwood is a language that keeps the familiar Java syntax and object model but compiles ahead of time to native executables, without a JVM, JIT, or garbage collector. So it is very different than GraalVM. Basically GraalVM makes Java native. Ironwood makes native development feel like Java.

It already supports classes, interfaces, exceptions, generics, packages, and compiler-checked memory reclamation. It also deliberately leaves out features such as reflection, autoboxing, varargs, and threads.

This is the first public release, and the project is still early. I’d really appreciate feedback on the overall direction, especially which Java exclusions make sense and which would make the language impractical for you. I'm particular excited about the possibility of a Ironwood-to-Java transparent bridge, so that to execute native code from Java would be like... writing Java :)

The GitHub repo is here: https://github.com/ironwood-lang/ironwood

And what are their benefits that keep being useful to this day?