I mean, micro-benchmarks are just generally not something to put a huge amount of stock into in general, regardless of language. Software that scales out to hundreds of thousands if not millions of users is generally written in "slow", "bloated" languages, and seems to be doing ok. It really all depends on the use case, and who is creating the software. Most enterprise software is slow and bloated, but a lot of other stuff exists that is quite the contrary. Two easy examples:

- Cyberduck is written in Java, yet nobody seems to be complaining about how slow and bloated it is.

- There exists a version of Quake 2 written in Java: http://bytonic.de/html/benchmarks.html It seems to be able to push out more frames than native, actually.

Both of those are real software that actually run well on Java, regardless of penalty paid for running in a VM, JIT, and GC.

Also when looking at the amount of memory and time taken when comparing C to Java in the microbenchmarks, always be sure to mentally factor in the base overhead of starting up the JVM both in time and memory. It's pretty easy to see that when a C version takes up something like 100KB of memory and the Java one takes up 30MB, Java consistently takes up at least ~30MB regardless of how much memory is required for that microbenchmark. When the C version takes up 300MB and the Java one takes up 700MB, that's a bit better of a comparison. (though still not perfect, because the Java GC will reserve a lot of memory for itself, even if it isn't using the full 700MB, if it feels it needs that much, etc.)