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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

Thinking logically if some language is built on some other language then the derived language can be at most as fast as the underlying language

That is not true. Why? Because the C compiler optimizes at compile time, and the VM optimizes at compile time and at runtime. It can be much smarter at inlining, loop unrolling, etc.

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Also, Scala is not "built on" the Java language, as far as I know. It compiles to bytecode, just as the Java language does.

Yep, at this point in history Java-the-language and Java-the-VM are related in name only.

Could you elaborate? It is my understanding that 99.9% of Java syntax is valid Scala syntax. How does that correlate with your statement?

The compilation path is Scala -> JVM bytecode [-> x86 assembly], not Scala -> Java -> JVM bytecode [-> x86 assembly]. At least, that's what I think your parent comment was saying.

No, Java and Scala syntax are quite different. I can really only think of a few cases where they share syntax.

I wonder where people are getting this (you're not the first person I've heard this from)? The syntax is not compatible at all. You can write programs in the same style, e.g. object oriented with inheritance, global state, side effects, and so on; but the similarity ends there.

Agreed. Likewise the article is wrong when it says Java is built "on top" of C/C++. It compiles to JVM bytecode which is JIT compiled to native machine code.

So its whole "thinking logically" premise is broken.

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