[speedgoose]

It's not really Java as a programming langage, you can have light and fast Java code, nor the JVM, it's a pretty fast virtual machine that is just very memory hungry by default. In my opinion it's the community and the philosophy around Java. It's usually a bit over engineered and performances are not taken into account very often. Take eclipse as an example, from a software design point of view it's great and a very advanced. You can for example play with the eclipse modeling framework and it's in another league compared to VS code plug-ins.

However the end user doesn't really care about the beauty of the Eclipse meta meta model and think more about why it takes so long to start or why it uses to much memory compared to notepad++.

Also while Vscode is written in typescript/javascript, it uses V8 for the javascript VM which is very fast.