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Faster is not always what we are after though. I recently wrote a piece of code to run in tightly constrained (but not embedded) environments, and C was the natural choice. The Python or PHP or JavaScript interpreter and VM just wouldn't fit in the RAM.

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Sometimes you don't want to suck up all of the RAM on a non-embedded machine, either. Also faster startup times and no collector pauses. A lot of times those are required.

collector pauses brings up some discussions I've had with some friends - in essence, it's not something you want your platform to do when you're programming something like a game where you're pushing 60 frames a second + audio.

If you don't know what to look for you could end up looking for a long time.

Yea, Strings in Java take up much more memory than one would expect.

Minimum String memory usage (bytes) = 8 * (int) ((((no chars) * 2) + 45) / 8)

http://www.javamex.com/tutorials/memory/string_memory_usage....

Objects in general also have significant overhead.

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