This blog looks pretty interesting, guess I’ll read through it in detail some time. It seems like when the code is optimized then the JIT can do just as much as a normal compiler. But for some reason most common JVM libraries just don’t keep up with it’s common native competitors. Maybe it’s just harder to write efficient JVM code? At least I can’t think of another reason.
Go or Rust are “safe” too so I don’t think that’s a reason. But they are lighter in the sense that you often have far less objects (or structures when talking about functional languages).