It exists but isn’t the same as a natively compiled binary. A lot gets packed into an AOT binary for it to work. Longer startup times, more memory, etc.

Just like Go, there is no magic here.

Where do you think Go gets those chubby static linked executables from?

That people have to apply UPX on top.

Go’s static binaries are orders of magnitude smaller than .Net’s static binaries. However, you are right, all binaries have some bloat in order to make them executable.

This is flat out incorrect if you are doing AOT in C#

How? What I said was fact. All executables have some bloat that makes them executables. Golang’s being the smaller. Whether it’s shared lib pointer or static…