Just a quick link to an interesting post on The Register here that discusses some 'myth busting' by two Google employees on the common myths surrounding the Java runtime/language. Very interesting reading, and a nice followup to my previous post. The The Register post links to this blog post which then links on to this interesting (powerpoint) slide deck.
In my day-to-day use of Java, I find it to be very performant, so it is quite unfair the stigma that is attached to it, that I presume arises due to the Java of yore - i.e. mid 90's Java. As noted in the links above, each Java release (we're presently at Java 1.6) achieves a very good performance boost over the previous release. As noted in the previous post, there is however very easy ways to ruin the performance of (particularly) AWT/Swing user interface applications, given the necessary use of threads, and the lack of understanding that many developers have generally towards threading, and specifically towards Java GUI threading.
Thoughts on “Java Performance Myths”