I may be biased, but I think that if you have a budget that's reasonable in the industry for some project size and includes not only the initial development but also maintenance and evolution over the software's lifetime, especially when it's not small (say over 200KLOC), and you want to choose the language that would give you the fastest outcome, you will not get a faster program than if you chose Java. To get a faster program in any language, if possible, would require a significantly higher budget (especially for the maintenance and evolution).
Go?
I don't think so, but it may not be far behind. More importantly, though, I'm fairly confident it won't be Assembly, or C, or C++, or Rust, or Zig, but also not Python, or TS/JS. The candidates would most likely include Java, C#, and Go.
Do you think C# / .NET doesn't stack up in terms of budget, or not stack up in terms of runtime speed?
It's probably in the same ballpark. To me, the contenders for "the fastest language" include Java, C#, and Go and not many more.
Ah thanks. That clarifies things.
Purely by the numbers, an "average programmer" is much more likely to use Javascript, Python, or Java. The native languages have been a bit of a niche field since the late 90's (i.e. heavily slanted towards OS, embedded, and gamedev folks)