This is a bit of a false equivalency -- there aren't many perf benefits in rewriting a C program in asm. The cost you pay for that rewrite is also much greater.

Yes, of course $HIGH_LEVEL_LANG is preferable for many many use cases. In this context, we're discussing "high speed trading systems", for which native implementations are going to be the favorite.

> for which native implementations are going to be the favorite

...but the point of the article is they aren't always the favourite.

They mention not even using most of the Java features (exceptions, built in GC) that make it safe. So I think it's a pretty fair question, since they are essentially using a very stripped down version of the language that removes most of the compelling reasons to use it, and seemingly fighting the language runtime along the way.

The reason these people still use Java is that everything else can be nice high-level Java code.

So they use regular Java for the build system, deployment, testing, logging, loading configuration, debugging, etc etc. There's a small core written in this strange way... but everything else is easier. And things like your profiler and debugger still work on the core as well.