I've noted this to be true in regards to salary. I've been writing high-performance Java code since years (chewing a few trillion computer files as fast as poss

I've noted this to be true in regards to salary. I've been writing high-performance Java code since years (chewing a few trillion computer files as fast as possible) and we certainly would have switched to anything else such as C++ if it was faster. Our internal performance testing is ranking Java on par with the C++ implementations of the same algorithm (performance typically flattens until a bottleneck is reached such as disk read speed) or completing the same tasks faster. In one side this is due to the JVM optimizations done automatically, the other side is having developers that understand how to write efficient code. This does require an experienced developer which understands how his code is impacting performance. For example, avoiding ArrayLists or String objects and learning to use direct arrays or char objects. I can see LWJGL being useful, most particularly to help keep the infrastructure under the same language so that development and long-term maintenance are not a nightmare.