[parasubvert]

Sun hired some of the best minds in the business to make Java perform around 1999 - literally the guys that wrote the first runtime optimizing compilers and generational garbage collectors (eg. David Unger and team from Self), and also had some of the pioneers in LISP (Guy Steele). The major performance gains began in Java 1.3 in 2000 through Java 5 in 2004, with steady gains since, particularly in terms of garbage collection in large-memory, multi-core environments.

IBM also had some very bright minds working on their J9 JVM which was aoriginally targeted at embedded environments but was so good it became their mainstream VM. I'm not sure how much "borrowing" it does from the Oracle VM, but it's definitely a different architecture.

Another language could do this of it had wealthy patrons with a keen interest to make it so. Google with Python might be a possibility, but they are huge Java users already and have some of the old Sun team working for them.

[archangel_one]

Google started with Python with Unladen Swallow, but stopped after a combination of uninspiring results and the fact that while Google uses a lot of Python internally, it's generally for non-performance-critical applications. For the cases where performance counts, it's generally done in C++ instead.