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Comment by nemothekid | Hacker News Reader

Also a lot of the de-facto Big Data/NoSQL/Distributed Computing stack is Java(/Scala). Hadoop, HBase, Cassandra, Neo4j, Storm, its actually pretty interesting to note that most of the popular nosql solutions are in Java. On top of that its the number 3 language on Github.

I'm not a huge fan of Java but I'd be pretty surprised if someone was saying Java wasn't relevant. Don't quote me on this, but its also the fastest language you are going to get without pulling out C/C++. When the author made the claim that Java was as fast as Go, I was a bit surprised. I wasn't aware Go had caught up to Java.

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> When the author made the claim that Java was as fast as Go, I was a bit surprised. I wasn't aware Go had caught up to Java.

As a Go "fan": it hasn't. It's close in some things, faster in a few, but the JVM has years (and years) of performance tuning in it, and Go won't unequivocally beat Java for some time (if ever).

(This WiFi connection is failing me right now, but there's a good number of Go vs. Java benchmarks out there, for whatever benchmarks are worth)

I was only referring to the Web framework benchmark, where Go (1.1 I think) is taking the lead over Servlets on many of the benchmarks. Still impressive.

That was my reaction as well. We are using Go in production here and I'm very much a Go fan, but I'd be surprised if Go caught up to Java in so little time.

I was referring to this benchmark: http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

That benchmark makes it clear Go has not caught up to Java in performance.

Out of the 10 tests that have both Java and Go results, Java is faster than Go in 9 tests while Go is faster than Java in 1 test (by 0.2%, so not significant).

I counted go lead on 3 of the tests, but I agree with your point, will fix the article accordingly, thanks!

Only 1 of those 3 tests (the very 1st one) also contains Java results. The other 2 are Windows tests that don't contain any Java results.

Hence I said that out of the 10 tests that contain both Go and Java results Go only beats Java (by a statistically insignificant 0.2%) in 1 test while Java beats Go in the other 9 tests.

You are so right, bad attention to details day for me. corrected the article in any case. thanks!

There is no reason why Go can't quickly catch up with Java. It's memory model is better suited to optimization vs. JVM.

JVM crypto (i.e. using encryption libraries) can be faster than native because of function inlining (whereas in C/C++ you don't inline across libraries at link time because an update to the crypto library would require a recompile).

Java and Mono have been shown to be roughly comparable overall in speed, each a bit worse or better than the other in some ways, I've read.

Shown where? Mono's JIT is nowhere near as good as OpenJDK/Hotspot.

http://stackoverflow.com/a/9138207 I think this is the answer I was thinking about.

It's also because of automatic garbage collection and the fact that programmers today can't handle memory management.

Programmers in the past couldn't handle memory management either.

Programmers today do not have to handle memory management because of JVM. Programmers yesterday could not handle memory management that's why jvm came into existence.

It's because of automatic compilation and the fact that programmers today can't handle register management.

It's because of integrated circuits and the fact that programmers today can't handle voltage management.

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