I mention this because programmers seem prone to this, and letting theory trump fact is a great way to make sure that you never learn anything.
I think it's also important to note that the slowness is relative to an incredibly fast C implementation - taking twice the time sounds painful, but in reality the pauses caused by Git are barely perceptible as-is, and double of that is not likely to be very annoying.
The title takes one specific application in a particular niche, used in a certain way which a particular programmer can't get to run fast enough, and concludes that Java isn't fast enough. Faulty logic.
The argument about JGit vs C-git for me isn't something I feel you can learn anything from.
Really? In general? That statements seams worse than the original headline. Is Java faster than C for anything?
Yes Java can be faster than C in some situations.
Can C ever be faster than assembly? Well, in theory no. But in practice, sometimes.
Depends if you're a master assembly programmer who hand optimizes everything.
Unless the person writing the C implementation is grossly incompetent, I would like to see even one example for that.
BTW, if it's so obvious why haven't you still provided at least one non-trivial concrete example of Java faster than C?
I remember I used the shortest possible integers and the register keyword in the late 80's far too many times to count.
The point of somewhat higher-level languages like Java (I refuse to say Java is a high-level language - it would be one in the late 80s, but not today) is not to make programs run faster, but to make it easier to make them run correctly.