Things you never thought you’d see in the same sentence: “Java” and “performance”

OK, so that’s a cheap shot. But really, the big gripe against Java since forever was that it was slow, slow, slow. That’s why Computerworld’s recent article about other JVM languages is so intriguing, as it contains this quote from Tim Bray: “These days, the JVM, especially HotSpot, has extremely high performance.” In other words, everyone’s trying to latch onto that speedy JVM!

Now, Bray is a Sun employee and thus not exactly a neutral observer (though it’s worth pointing out that he’s by no means a mindless Java booster). Does this mean that Sun’s given up on keeping Java-as-a-language the top dog on the JVM? Well, think of it this way: the HotSpot VM is something that can be monetized a lot more easily than the open source language. As long as they keep coming back for the VM, who cares what they’re running on it?