> If what's needed is speed, neither Java nor C# are optimal choices "Speed" is relative. If you mean throughput or scalability (2 different things), then the

> If what's needed is speed, neither Java nor C# are optimal choices "Speed" is relative. If you mean throughput or scalability (2 different things), then the JVM or the CLR may be exactly what you want due to the ease with which one can juggle with multi-threading on multi-core processors. Single-threaded performance is becoming less and less interesting and dealing with multithreading or with asynchronous I/O in lower-level languages, such as C/C++, is an extreme pain in the ass - because for example, C/C++ doesn't come with a memory model by itself (i.e. you can get fucked even when running with a different Glibc version) and the poster child for async I/O, libevent, has been plagued for years with concurrency issues, leading to a whole generation of insecure web servers. The JVM, .NET and managed runtimes in general are great choices for going forward, because not only they come with memory model guarantees and a sane standard library - but having higher-level bytecode under the hood that can be generated at runtime means that either the runtime or the libraries running on top can repurpose that bytecode at runtime for optimal execution. Like for example, you could target the GPU when dealing with parallel collections.