The Java problem is not that JVM is itself slow, but that Java is so inconvenient to use, that people use tons of stacks of libraries to accomplish even simplest things (think dependency injection) that JVM becomes bloated by loading and calling all these libraries, and in effect is slow.
I've seen most ridiculous stacktraces only in Java.
Slow?. That comment is so 90's. Plz upgrade http://shootout.alioth.debian.org
Yeah microbenchmarks are cool to stare on when your farm of those jboss instances for another very important project is crawling. Very motivating.
Wake up, this is reality.
They are coming in Perl too ... with Moose leading the way.
One thing the article doesn't mention is that Java once had a slow interpreter and now it has a potentially faster interpreter. When Java had a slow interpreter, then it would be inherently slow for a larger spectrum of problem - but still not all of them.