I'd like to know what version (and vendor, especially in the case of Java) of each he was running. I've heard time and time again that "Java isn't as slow any more" and maybe that is the case with the "newer" Sun (and Oracle) versions.

However, as one of the later mails[1] says, "such a short program doesn't give the JIT time to warm up"—"Hello world" is a poor comparison to real-world performance.

http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/chicken-users/2011-03/m...