Hallo Gerrit!

 GK> The stuff is OSS, but I don't compile it myself, I just let the
 GK> vendor or the community do the legwork.

Does that include "Msged/BSD 6.1.2" and/or "hpt/fbsd 1.9.0-cur 08-05-14"?

 GK> many people do not recognise that embedded platforms and such
 GK> were the original target market for java when it was invented by
 GK> Sun's engineers

I've run across many such things over the years.  Nothing much lately but then
again I don't usually follow embedded development for the mostpart.

 GK> Selecting a language heavily depends on the intended use and
 GK> context.

Development would be of primary interest as far as I am concerned and thus an
embedded enviroment is more of a curiousity than an actual working enviroment
up to and including the raspi3b+ I happen to have built a LFS-ish for.  That
was fun for awhile.  Absolutely zero java on there as everything was (is?)
gcc/glibc based.  I haven't worked on it for about a year now as I have little
to nothing for it to actually do for the network I have working for the "cause"
whatever the "cause" might happen to be.  Getting a working pure 64-bit
aarch64-linux-gnu enviroment was my prime motivation at the time and I believe
I had done a good job.

 GK> in some places gcc really sucked

Example(s)?  The only one I can claim any experience with would be any 16-bit
DOS enviroment running on 32-bit processors.  :::shudder:::  What a bad joke
that whole concept turned out to be.

 GK> but it makes maintenance for "appliances" that are supposed to
 GK> "just work" based on this software a real hassle at times

Agreed.  In my case the lack of appliances that "just work" are the usual
source of grief which means having working gcc/glibc enviroment to take care of
things that actually matter is the prime motivation for all the systems under
my care.  Mind you I have yet to send anything out to explore the universe on
it's own so perhaps I am looking at "appliances" the wrong way?

Het leven is goed,
Maurice

... Huil niet om mij, ik heb vi.
--- GNU bash, version 5.0.11(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)