There's absolutely nothing about native languages that makes them a-priori faster than the JVM. On the contrary, the JVMs compiler is likely to emit betteroptimized machine code than their compilers. Some low-level languages (like C/C++/Rust) can (and do in many cases) offer better performance, but that's not because they're "native" but because they allow (and require) finer control over every operation. This level of control comes at a significant cost, though.