Ah, things have obviously moved on since I left the Java world years ago. In any event, the VM is still specified at the bytecode level. The JITs are optimizati

Ah, things have obviously moved on since I left the Java world years ago. In any event, the VM is still specified at the bytecode level. The JITs are optimizations that are outside of the standard. The .NET ECMA standard specifies an IL that is designed to be JITed to native code. To the parent question, the performance is very close on the two platforms. The point I was trying to make is that the .NET platform does have some things in it's favor at the IL/VM level.