I believe the '1 JVM = 10 Thins' remark you link to refers to the amount of servers they needed to run. Not the amount of code. Also Thin is a Ruby webserver, n

I believe the '1 JVM = 10 Thins' remark you link to refers to the amount of servers they needed to run. Not the amount of code. Also Thin is a Ruby webserver, not Scala nor Java. If the Computer Language Benchmark is any reference, 10 lines of Java ~= 8 lines of Scala : http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=java&lang2=scala&data=u64q http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?t... And 10 lines of Scala ~= 6 lines of Ruby : http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=yarv&lang2=scala&data=u64q http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?t... There's a pretty dramatic performance drop noted going from Scala to Ruby though. (or 10:8:5 Java:Scala:Ruby if you wish)