[mothsonasloth]

Java unfairly has been given a bad rep since its earlier versions (similar to how PHP still is tainted by its SQL injection vulnerabilities pre PHP7)

Java as you know is translated into byte code and then it is up to the compiler to use JIT compilation when running the code. JIT allows flexibility to choose how to optimise linkers and references to other libraries which means that it can choose how to optimise the code after Run 1, 10, 100. Some Java VMs can decide to optimise "fast startup" vs "fast runtime".

This is a nice flexibility and with Java maturing into Java 17 there are more and more optimisations on the horizon for VMs, GC and precompiling dependencies.