[maxandersen]

You've largely ignored everything I’ve said. Instead, you proposed workarounds – which is precisely what most people want to avoid. Who distributes applications as fat jars? What is this? 2004? You’re supposed to distribute your application as executables.

and still npm, python, and other ecosystems don't do that. they effectively ships what corresponds to jars with dependency metadata.

I also did not say fat jars (even though that works fine too).

Why don't java world be ok with utilizing that option like other ecosystems.

I know why they didn't do it in past when something like jbang did not exist - just like javascript didn't do it before npm (and fast node runtime) came around...

I’ve brought up numerous complaint regarding jpackage and jlink, and none of them have been addressed by jbang.

I explicitly wrote: "Reading this and reddit thread I see that the final publish of jars/executables is still too tedious I'm going to try solve that challenge as we have all the pieces (IMO) with jbang/jreleaser and modern JDKs." so I did not claim jbang solves it - I said I could see how it could be better.

What I did show or at least tried to was that your complaint about something like scala-cli and how Go could do all things out of box...jbang exist to bridge that gap.

Furthermore, you accuse me of not having used Java in the last five years, which is frankly ridiculous;

I did not claim that at all. I said you seem to have missed the last years improvements in this space (jbang being a key one enabling majority of the issues you brought forward).

I've spent almost two decades developing software on the JVM. Funnily enough, I had to write my own sbt plugins because jlink and jpackage are so painful to use.

yes, I agree jlink and jpackage is not good enough.

I haven't tried tackle it yet as I used jreleaser most of time to hide that pain - and I agree its not solved yet...but also trying to show that distributing everything as native OS binaries is NOT an absolute requirement and not what other ecosystems does.

Heck, even Go allow for running git repos by compiling it locally before running it... jbang allow similar workflows - on top of plain java.

Regarding UpX: it simply doesn’t work with Windows binaries generated by Graal – see this issue: https://github.com/oracle/graal/issues/7605. They've been ignoring this for three years instead of fixing it. Meanwhile, it works perfectly with Go binaries or .NET’s AOT compiler.

gotcha - haven't tried it on windows for a while and looks like it did work in GraalVM 21 and just issue on future versions.

I’m not trying to bash your project, but the reality is that no one with little to no Java experience is going to discover and install jbang. Features like this should be included with Java out of the box.

yeah - well neither node, python and others had these to begin with.

Its a very Java'esque mindset to require it in the default toolchain to be considered useful.

I wonder why anyone even still try using maven or gradle or sbt - it does not come with Java itself either :)