Well, back in the day... :-) http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=hello&lang=all http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=h

Well, back in the day... :-) http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=hello&lang=all http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=hel... But "if all you ever want to do with programming is write little boring scripts" it might help to understand that 9 hundredths of a second delay is below the threshold that someone using the boring little script will notice. And "if all you ever want to do with programming is write little boring scripts" simply using Java as an interpreter with -Xint might be faster. For example, that old benchmarks game n=200 "hello world" Java 6 -Xint 15.429s Java 6 -client 16.929s Java 6 -server 17.073s Java 1.4 -server 35.738s