Is Java a slow language?
You can have a look for yourself at the Computer Language Benchmarks Game: Java vs. Erlang ( Erlang in the industry ) Java vs. Scala Java vs. C# Mono (note that I'm told that Mono's runtime may be inferior in some aspects to the official .NET CLR) Various approaches to detailed analysis: Java performance (Wikipedia) Java is Slow Revisited (2007) Performance of Java versus C++ by J.P.Lewis and Ulrich Neumann, Computer Graphics and Immersive Technology Lab, University of Southern California (2003) Java theory and practice: Urban performance legends, revisited (IBM, 2005) Java Performance (Code Instructions) All in all, we can conclude that neither Java, nor it's much higher level sibling, Scala deserves a reputation for being slow, though memory usage does show room for improvement. However, I would look forward to seeing results of the game tests ran under different virtual machines. I am working on a post about efficient high level embedded programming (including Java),...