Java > Scala

[Regan Heath]

On Wed, 30 Nov 2011 14:46:10 -0000, Paulo Pinto <pjmlp at progtools.org>  
wrote:
> I am with Russel here.
>
> I work mostly in JVM and .Net environments and although currently I am  
> the opinion that there are too many VM based applications, we hardly  
> have any performance issues.

Then you're not doing enough :p

Seriously tho, I think it's a fairly accurate (as generalisations go)  
statement that you /can/ get more performance out of natively compiled  
code.  If you don't need that extra performance, ever, then you're not  
losing anything by using a virtual machine style language.

> When they do happen we are able to track them mostly to bad coding  
> practices.

Yeah, this is the more/most common cause of performance issues (in any  
language).  Perhaps a useful measure of a language is how easy/hard it is  
to write bad performing code.

> JNI or P/Invoke are seldom used for performance reasons and mostly to  
> integrate with some specific OS feature.

This is one of the downsides to using JAVA or other sandboxed/JVM style  
languages, when you actually need bare metal access (and in some domains  
that is very rarely) you have to take a hit in performance and/or  
functionality.  It's another cost you pay, but one which may not be  
relevant depending on the domain you're in.

The ivory tower of performance with safety with quick development time  
with easy to understand code and tools is simply not possible, there are  
to many decisions in language development which boil down to a trade off  
between one or more of these ideals.

Regan