[microtonal]

but in terms of performance it was no slower than any native program except for in the most extreme cases.

Java applications were really slow, and certainly much slower than native programs, until HotSpot became the default in J2SE 1.3. It's distance history now, but I remember a lot of excitement about Java in 1996 (compile once) and then disappointment of how slow it was.

(After some iterations HotSpot became a really good JIT compiler.)