[ironchef]

Nah...there's tons of workarounds these days which make things way faster / less latent. Couple quick examples:

* look at memory mapped data in java (basically using sun.misc.Unsafe lets you deal with things like malloc and free)

* look at increasing use of primitives and collections that utilize primitives appropriately

* properly profile / size your eden space

yada yada ... i think a lot of HN people have generally just wrote off java as not as fast as C, not as productive as python/ruby, and not as exciting as lisp, haskell, FOTM. Java's a fine tool like anything else...just need to use it appropriately.