I am comparing with the best in class of non-VM languages (C). That's what all the multiples mean. What Java shows (and a comparison of averages per class woul

I am comparing with the best in class of non-VM languages (C). That's what all the multiples mean. What Java shows (and a comparison of averages per class wouldn't show) is that there is not necessarily a 4x decrease in efficiency as a result of using a VM. It depends on the implementation. And there are quite a few other VM languages that are doing far better than 4x. Swift clearly demonstrates that native AOT compilation is no guarantee for efficiency. Swift may well have become faster since this study was run (same goes for other languages), but using reference counting for garbage collection will make it very hard to catch up to the best.