Sure, there's some transition region between "don't care" and "care" but I find a lot of people tend to be strongly in one or the other (sometimes wrongly). An

Sure, there's some transition region between "don't care" and "care" but I find a lot of people tend to be strongly in one or the other (sometimes wrongly). Another benchmark: https://days2011.scala-lang.org/sites/days2011/files/ws3-1-Hundt.pdf https://days2011.scala-lang.org/sites/days2011/files/ws3-1-H... Keep in mind though that the JVM is a moving target. It keeps getting better (on one hand) and on some platforms it's worse (e.g. Android, though the upcoming new version looks promising). It's possible the gap is smaller now than what I remember seeing in the past. At any rate, if x2 is a number that feels right for the stuff you're doing I can't argue with that. You need to choose the language that works for you. Maybe you choose Java because of the libraries. Maybe you have more experience writing in Java and you're a lot more productive. Maybe there is better tooling. Maybe it's just more in line with how you think. A web server does a lot of file I/O and a lot of network I/O. The performance of a web server is more about how efficiently you can juggle those given highly concurrent loads and what mechanisms are used at the native layer to interface to those systems. It's not so much about the "raw" power of the language. In your game engine example a lot of the heavy lifting is done in OpenGL which is native code. I'm also not intimately familiar with the details there. At some point it's also about how much effort went into optimizing things and whether or not something else was traded off. To contrast that, Google Code Jam tasks are typically algorithmic and they stress the "raw" power aspect of the language. That said it's certainly not representative of real-world product development.