Comment by slopinthebag

I don't think it's true that Java offers strictly more optimisation opportunities than low-level languages, but rather different optimization opportunities. C++ and Rust have other opportunities that Java does not generally have:

- Explicit object lifetime and deterministic destruction.

- Stack allocation by default.

- Value types and direct embedding of values in data structures.

- Precise control over data layout, alignment, padding, and SIMD-friendly representations.

- Explicit allocation strategies: arenas, pools, slab allocators, region allocators, custom allocators, memory mapping, etc.

- No mandatory tracing, write barriers, object headers, or garbage-collector scheduling.

- Native interoperation without an FFI boundary.

- More predictable latency behavior.

- Compile-time specialization through templates in C++ and monomorphized generics in Rust.

Rust’s ownership and borrowing model can also provide strong non-aliasing and mutability guarantees in safe code which are useful for optimization.

Saying that "Low-level languages sacrifice performance for control" is also not true imo, since they can avoid allocation entirely, store data contiguously rather than as individually allocated objects, avoid all gc work, control cache behavior and eliminate pointer chasing, and importantly, guarantee hard or soft latency bounds.

Saying that "Most virtual calls in Java are faster than many static calls in C" is not a meaningful claim either. I think? Cuz "it depends" :)

And remember that GC is not free. Objects must eventually be traced. Reference writes may require write barriers. Objects have headers and alignment overhead. Heap size must often be larger to maintain throughput. Concurrent collectors consume CPU and memory bandwidth. Stop-the-world phases or other latency issues remain even with modern collectors. Object movement can complicate native interoperability and pinning. Malloc can cause performance issues but Java is not beating an arena allocator in C++ or Rust.

Keep in mind speed and throughput are not the only performance metrics. So is startup time and memory footprint, where Java loses badly here.

I wish we had real published research to go off of here but real world examples are all we really have. I'm not seeing AAA game studios building their engines in Java. I don't see any OS's building their kernel (or anything really) in Java. If Java is faster than low level languages, why is that?

And look, I don't dislike Java or the JVM, and I'm actually a really big fan of C#. I just like Rust more.