`jlink` was released for Java 9, I believe, so it's unlikely people who are upgrading from Java 8 already have the infrastructure in place to seamlessly transition to that instead of however they were managing their JAR files before.
"But this should be simple! It's almost like a Go binary!" I've learned not to underestimate how long it can take to change infrastructure. DevOps isn't seen as a profit center in most places, and they might well have much bigger things to worry about than transitioning from a kind of working JARs-on-VMs approach.
Jlink/jpackage UX isnt the best either. They mostly produce installers not a single binary that you can just run. Project Leyden has some interesting work around this called Hermetic Java which plans to ship one binary with the VM + jar together. It’s coming out of some folks at Google. I’m really looking forward to it.
Really now? Now that's interesting. I thought GraalVM might be a good option in that space https://www.graalvm.org/ last I checked, but something literally called Hermetic Java has my interest piqued.
"But this should be simple! It's almost like a Go binary!" I've learned not to underestimate how long it can take to change infrastructure. DevOps isn't seen as a profit center in most places, and they might well have much bigger things to worry about than transitioning from a kind of working JARs-on-VMs approach.