I’ll get back to you asap…

Of course there are many drawbacks of using managed languages when it comes to performance, let alone Java which has even more significant performance problems compared to languages like C#. But the fact that managed languages can be faster than native code in some aspects, like allocations, is interesting in my opinion.

I completely agree with you that the effort put to keep these languages as simple as they are makes them less efficient in terms of speed and memory usage. Because this basically means taking the burden off developers’ shoulders and putting them on JVM, in Java case, and we know that computers are not as good with the ‘big picture’ as humans. This usually prevents making optimizations that are related to the semantic structure of programs.

But I don’t think that’s much of an issue with most of the Java developers, since the point of Java is to shorten the development time where runtime performance loss is acceptable to some degree, for most people anyway. I don’t think the aim of SUN with Java is to make it a cross platform C++ abstraction, as complicated but not nearly as fast. Though some people claim that it is already the case, see the second quote at the end of the article.

http://www.jroller.com/gonenc/entry/continuous_object_array_allocation

The constraints enforced by Java, to keep the language design simple is causing a problem for a good cache usage, since everything in Java is an Object (or in other words pointers).