[api]

TL;DR:

* Micro-benchmarks don't provide a good picture of real system performance and can be skewed to make almost anything look better/worse than anything else.

* Much of Java's "slowness," clunkiness, large amounts of boilerplate code, etc. is the fault of the Java ecosystem and libraries rather than the language itself or the JVM.

* The inverse is true for Node: the quality of its ecosystem helps make up for language and runtime shortcomings.