[wmfiv]

Java's reputation for sluggishness was really formed based on people's experience with Applets and Swing applications and especially badly written Applets and Swing applications.

Java in the real world is fast. That's why it's used as the backbone of so many large organizations and so many scale out solutions (Cassandra, Kafka, Hadoop, etc) are written in Java.

[pjc50]

Yes, I'd take this in conjunction with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17824575 : "language speed" and "UI responsiveness" are only loosely related, and there are so many ways to end up wasting time blocking or locking without really realising it.

[mindslight]

> Java's reputation for sluggishness was really formed based on people's experience with Applets and Swing applications

... and contemporary interactive performance.

    python    < /dev/null  0.01s user 0.01s system  96% cpu   0.025 total
    racket    < /dev/null  0.17s user 0.02s system  98% cpu   0.198 total

    java                   0.09s user 0.02s system  94% cpu   0.118 total
    clojure   < /dev/null  2.07s user 0.06s system 170% cpu   1.247 total

There's of course a theoretical point about being shoehorned into the UNIX execution model, and if Java were able to run as a persistent OS (eg nailgun or whatever it is these days) then things get much better. But still, when you start off a project having to suffer and design workarounds for the language's and implementation's flaws...

[hmijail]

(Author here)

But that's not "Java in the real world". If anything I'd presume that that's "well programmed Java".