One of the main challenges in getting acceptance for safe object-oriented languages in hard real-time systems is to combine automatic memory management with hard real-time constraints, while providing adequate general execution performance.An approach to real-time Java based on ahead-of-time compilation is presented, and real-time properties and problems are examined. In particular, achieving both low latency and high throughput in an environment where neither the back-end compiler nor the scheduler is aware of automatic memory management is considered. Optimizations in both the compiler and run-time system, aimed at reducing the execution time overhead while still allowing very short latency times, is presented and experimentally verified.