I keep having trouble thinking of Java as "fast" When it first came out it was an absolute dog. Then Sun kept promising "faster than C" performance because of

I keep having trouble thinking of Java as "fast" When it first came out it was an absolute dog. Then Sun kept promising "faster than C" performance because of VM optimisation. The reality was that desktop apps were barely usable and the HotJava web browser was scrapped. However, after over 15 years of VM optimisation and heavy use, Java is nice and fast. Its not quite up to C++ levels of performance but it is very respectable.