The JVM has never been 1000x slower than native code. Fourteen years ago it was occasionally as much as 10x slower. What's the penalty these days, maybe 10%? And in return we don't risk undefined behavior if anyone who worked on the project ever made a single mistake? Java is a mediocre language at best, it truly epitomizes everything pg said about Blub, but I'm still glad we didn't use C.

And assembly? Seriously? All but the tiniest processors are superscalar now, and the performance of code depends on obscure details about how instruction scheduling fits into pipelines. The way I hear it, there are only a handful of people in the world who can actually do that better than their compiler, and I'm not going to become one of them. There are too many other things to learn that I can keep using over more time.