I'm not saying there's never a use case for Java. It's reasonably well suited for server-side work (and most of your examples are IO-bound server processes). W

I'm not saying there's never a use case for Java. It's reasonably well suited for server-side work (and most of your examples are IO-bound server processes). When your main problem is IO, thread contention, etc., Java gives you better tools to address those problems. It's just not at all well suited for the kind of client apps that people run on their desktop computers, and to a lesser (but still visible) degree, it's not well suited for CPU-bound things like a lot of scientific computing, which is more where my expertise lies. Looking at Jake2, the author notes: "The 0.9.2 release shows a big improvent due to the new “fastjogl” OpenGL renderer. The new renderer reduces the number of native interface calls. JNI calls produce a considerable overhead and were the main bottleneck in our application." If he's doing enough JNI to make this the main bottleneck, then clearly quite a lot of the heavy lifting isn't being done with Java.