Sun was a supercomputer company. Java is the alternative to IBM operating system VM's running on mainframes. Nobody has that kind of hardware just lying around. Java was designed to run on $1000 SCSI hard-drives and 32Gb of RAM. The focus is on standardization, scalability, portability, buzzwords and expensive catering.

The guy that made the Chrome Javascript VM sat with a laptop in a small house in the Danish countryside. Because the focus was on normal everyday hardware. And guess who that was ? A former Sun Java VM programmer. So the "just use Chrome" developer demographic is sort of unintentionally ironic when they, well, open their mouths. Why do they think Chrome is so memory hungry anyway :P Well, the problem is actually the same problem that you have in other UI frameworks where event listeners and DOM references never gets released from the UI side. And there are some strange issues with anonymous functions and closures, but I do not know enough about that to comment.

Java is fine, but Javascript does not need to be Java. Apple just screwed up the LiveConnect bridge in Safari just to piss us off.. transition us all to a better state of mind. Or maybe that was Oracle, I have no clue anymore. The guy that worked on Jython probably felt very alone doing all the work and JRuby is only here because of desperation from Sun. And Scala is the solution for people who never finish anything. So maybe I should.. oh shiny..

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/nov2008/gb2008... http://labs.teppefall.com/2011/08/why_not_use_java_and_invok...