Waiting for @steveklabnik to write his post on this as it comes up in all of these threads. To give you a brief answer, the JVM bytecode is tied to JVM OO use c

Waiting for @steveklabnik to write his post on this as it comes up in all of these threads. To give you a brief answer, the JVM bytecode is tied to JVM OO use cases and carries with it a significant runtime library burden. There are many many other details I can give you about how JVM bytecode is tailored to Java the language, but suffice to say it is not simple and not generic.