The JVM is hot garbage. It is slow to start up, a memory hog - and like you mentioned previously, overabstracted - no amount of magic unboxing of primitives like int help its performance. There are 100s of different parameters one can set to control garbage collection and other performance characteristics. It's a job in itself dealing with the beast of JVM. YMMV but every time I've dealt with Java I was dissapointed. I'd much rather use C++, Julia, or pretty much any other AOT or JIT than Oracle/Sun's JVM.

You keep saving face. So you admit Linux is largely dynamically linked. Well Windows is too, even to C stdlib, look at how many versions of MSVC runtimes are in your system32 dir after just a few installs. Templates are preprocessor so obviously they are "statically linked."

Microsoft has a COM API (which a lot of C++ uses) but when I used to develop, I'd just call kernel32, user32, advapi32, and other system C APIs directly. COM is a POS imo. DirectX is a decently engineered class-based API. But the rest of them have a lot of flaws.

If you were really hardcore you'd know that these dlls in turn call ntdll, many calls in ntdll are undocumented but much faster than their wrappers in the other dlls. But no sane person is going to strictly do ntdll calls except for the most performance critical code.

I used to reverse engineer and delve deep into the windows API. I know a little bit more about performance than the average high level programmer.

And ultimately, .NET does a fine job with performance. C++ coders crapping all over .NET should take a look at the Objective C API of Apple. It's the default and every Objective C call incurs overhead and is basically a wrapper around the undocumented C API. But I don't think anyone ever complained about this abstraction, because it's such a stupid and small amount of performance to harp about. The convenience outweighs the tiny little uOPS loss.