[slopinthebag]

I think the only argument I’d make about high level programming languages is that software continues to outpace hardware development in sucking up as much performance gains as possible. One program written in a slower, garbage collected, high level language is ok, when they are all it’s bad. I think eventually we’ll get to a point where we won’t have to think about memory management anymore but we aren't really there yet. Heck, software written in C++ like browsers are dog slow, imagine if they were written in Java…

[pron]

I originally came to Java because of the better performance it offered compared to C++ in large programs. The JVM is specifically designed to remove some of the fundamental performance overheads that low-level languages suffer from, and manifest especially when programs grow large (and a browser is quite large). So when someone talks to me about "GC languages" being slow and low-level languages being fast, I know they've not had much experience with either Java or low level languages, nor do they understand modern compilers and memory management. Java offers strictly more optimisation opportunities than low-level languages, in compilation as well as in memory management. What it gives up in exchange is low-level control (including worst-case performance), but it is low-level languages that sacrifice performance (especially average-case performance) in exchange for the control they need. Not being able to move pointers freely and not being able to deoptimise and recompile at runtime are serious impediments to modern optimisation, but low-level languages gladly give that up because they're not optimised for performance but for precise control.

In particular, modern moving collectors were designed for the purpose of removing the high overheads of malloc/free allocators that make heap memory management so expensive in low-level languages (and in any language that uses non-moving memory management strategies). The reason code in low-level languages tries to avoid things like heap allocation and virtual dispatch on the hot path is not because these things can't be super-fast (most virtual calls in Java are faster than many static calls in C), but because they are slow in low level languages because of their constraints.

[slopinthebag]

I don't think it's true that Java offers strictly more optimisation opportunities than low-level languages, but rather different optimization opportunities. C++ and Rust have other opportunities that Java does not generally have:

- Explicit object lifetime and deterministic destruction.

- Stack allocation by default.

- Value types and direct embedding of values in data structures.

- Precise control over data layout, alignment, padding, and SIMD-friendly representations.

- Explicit allocation strategies: arenas, pools, slab allocators, region allocators, custom allocators, memory mapping, etc.

- No mandatory tracing, write barriers, object headers, or garbage-collector scheduling.

- Native interoperation without an FFI boundary.

- More predictable latency behavior.

- Compile-time specialization through templates in C++ and monomorphized generics in Rust.

Rust’s ownership and borrowing model can also provide strong non-aliasing and mutability guarantees in safe code which are useful for optimization.

Saying that "Low-level languages sacrifice performance for control" is also not true imo, since they can avoid allocation entirely, store data contiguously rather than as individually allocated objects, avoid all gc work, control cache behavior and eliminate pointer chasing, and importantly, guarantee hard or soft latency bounds.

Saying that "Most virtual calls in Java are faster than many static calls in C" is not a meaningful claim either. I think? Cuz "it depends" :)

And remember that GC is not free. Objects must eventually be traced. Reference writes may require write barriers. Objects have headers and alignment overhead. Heap size must often be larger to maintain throughput. Concurrent collectors consume CPU and memory bandwidth. Stop-the-world phases or other latency issues remain even with modern collectors. Object movement can complicate native interoperability and pinning. Malloc can cause performance issues but Java is not beating an arena allocator in C++ or Rust.

Keep in mind speed and throughput are not the only performance metrics. So is startup time and memory footprint, where Java loses badly here.

I wish we had real published research to go off of here but real world examples are all we really have. I'm not seeing AAA game studios building their engines in Java. I don't see any OS's building their kernel (or anything really) in Java. If Java is faster than low level languages, why is that?

And look, I don't dislike Java or the JVM, and I'm actually a really big fan of C#. I just like Rust more.