>Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. - Greenspu

>Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. - Greenspun's tenth rule Joking aside, Java VM can be as fast as C++, not C, by using profiling and JIT optimization if tuned to a specific server and only measuring after running for a while. If you are really thinking about your allocators and not just calling malloc, nothing is faster. Half of this is due to less allocator calls and half is due to laying out the memory in a cache-friendly manner.