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Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

  > For some reason people give it a bad rap,

A lot of people have outdated opinions about Java, I know I did for a long time. Initially, the performance wansnt there, so people held that opinion without updating it when Java updated. Things are very different today.

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> Things are very different today.

Java has been fast for at least ten years.

Except start-up time. Java still has way too long a startup time, which you notice in desktop apps implemented in Java.

Even the JVM startup time isn't that bad now. It's actually a lot worse in my experience when using alternate JVM languages like Clojure and Scala.

Startup time can often be dramatically reduced if you unpack the jars. Jars are zip files. Loading a lot of jars can cause significant slow down.

HelloWorld.java runs in about 50msec on my machine.

However, there are lots of crap desktop apps written in Java that don't care about startup time. You can write apps with bad startup time in any language: look at OpenOffice (C++).

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