[PhilipRoman]

I think java being slow has less to do with the implementation (which is pretty good) and more to do with the culture of overengineering (including in the standard library). Everything creates objects (which the JIT cannot fully eliminate, escape analysis is not magic), cache usage is abysmal. Framework writers do their best to defeat the compiler by abusing reflection. And all these abstractions are far from zero cost, which is why even the JDK has to have hardcoded special cases for Streams of primitives and ByteBuffers.

Of course, if you have a simple fastpath you can make it fast in any language with a JIT, latency is also generally not an issue anymore, credit where credit is due - java GCs are light years ahead of everything else.

Regarding jlink - my main complaint is that everything requires java.base which already is 175M. And thats not counting the VM, etc. But I don't actively work with java anymore so please correct me if there is a way to get smaller images.