I think most applications could be sped up significantly by rewriting them more efficiently in their own language. You're rarely maxing out the possibilities of

I think most applications could be sped up significantly by rewriting them more efficiently in their own language. You're rarely maxing out the possibilities of the language you're using, because it requires time, skill and a different philosophy of development than you typically find in corporate software. >> Most of my Android apps typically take 1-2 seconds to load, again, courtesy of Java. Java is kind of a special case, because the time spent re-compiling the code every time is pure waste. Java code can be rewritten almost 1:1 in C++ and derive a performance benefit, at least for things like initial startup. iOS prefers ObjectiveC, so you could get some sense of the potential benefits of native code by playing with iOS apps. It's probably not as big as you might think, because there are a lot of other bottlenecks that have nothing to do with language. Firefox's use of XML for layout shouldn't make much difference, because XML parsing isn't really that slow and there are much bigger bottlenecks involved in rendering a GUI.