I've never heard anybody say that Java is that fast. It can be in very specific situations. Actually 2 - 3 times as fast as C++ is pretty awesome, especially si

I've never heard anybody say that Java is that fast. It can be in very specific situations. Actually 2 - 3 times as fast as C++ is pretty awesome, especially since that is hardly low level Java, rather quite abstract. I suspect low level Java could get it down to a flat 2x in this case. For a huge range of uses 2x as fast is effectively as fast as C, especially since taking advantage of multicore / parallelized operations is significantly easier (in a cross platform manner) than it is in C/C++.