You are welcome to your opinion on the utility of garbage collection but the widespread usage of GC suggests the industry as a whole does not share your view nor is such an unnaunced view supported by research (e.g. https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/1094811.1094836)
Avoid using appeals to authority when discussing, it doesn’t make you look good. Even more-so when your authority is relatively mundane and you’re totally incorrect.
And .exe-s still need the OS, dynamic libraries, and, perhaps most importantly, the CPU (which is pretty much a VM interpreter, modern CPUs having what's essentially a custom IR, peephole optimizations, aliasing analysis, JITting, loop unrolling, PGO, caching, ...), to run.
> In computing, a compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language (the source language) into another language (the target language).
And maybe also the second line. JVM bytecode is an object code as referenced there.
There are expections to this general rule of thumb, Cross-compiling is a term used for a horizonal translation.
I also watched this video of a PhD project that compiles JavaScript from an input of Visual data and JavaScript. Which is probably one of the more interesting uses of compiler I've seen.
Anyway, there’s no real agreement on the terms and everyone has an opinion. This is as useful as arguing “is a taco a sandwich”
