Sun hired some of the best minds in the business to make Java perform around 1999 - literally the guys that wrote the first runtime optimizing compilers and generational garbage collectors (eg. David Unger and team from Self), and also had some of the pioneers in LISP (Guy Steele). The major performance gains began in Java 1.3 in 2000 through Java 5 in 2004, with steady gains since, particularly in terms of garbage collection in large-memory, multi-core environments.

IBM also had some very bright minds working on their J9 JVM which was aoriginally targeted at embedded environments but was so good it became their mainstream VM. I'm not sure how much "borrowing" it does from the Oracle VM, but it's definitely a different architecture.

Another language could do this of it had wealthy patrons with a keen interest to make it so. Google with Python might be a possibility, but they are huge Java users already and have some of the old Sun team working for them.

Google started with Python with Unladen Swallow, but stopped after a combination of uninspiring results and the fact that while Google uses a lot of Python internally, it's generally for non-performance-critical applications. For the cases where performance counts, it's generally done in C++ instead.

Java has been pretty fast since it used a JIT circa 1998. The main reason it got a bad rap was that it needed tens of MB of memory for basic apps. This means that folks with their Pentium I's and II's with 64MB RAM perceived Java as slow since basic apps would swap like crazy. A few years later J(2)EE app servers (notoriously heavyweight) made heavy use of many many layers of abstraction resulting in poor performance. These two events have unfairly tainted Java's reputation.

The JVM has improved performance by developing more advanced garbage collectors and profiling JIT compilers over the years to the point where it is the JVM is the fastest managed runtime out there. http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=al...

Short version is that Java tends to take a lot of memory and a fair while to start up, but once it gets going it's very fast. A bit like comparing a Boeing to a small sports car. The sports car will drive you to the shop around the corner very fast. The Boeing will take a long time to prepare for takeoff, but once it gets going will leave the sports car behind in the dust.