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Comment by jsiep | Hacker News Reader

Besides the point that the Java example is not a good one; The JVM is actually a pretty mean piece of software with a lot of optimisation. So while Go could in theory produce faster code then Java I doubt the Go compiler is clever enough to produce faster code then the JVM in a lot scenarios (at the moment).

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But Java conceptually has a lot of drawbacks that require the JVM to have screaming performance to compensate for. Almost everything being a "headered" object being probably the worst offender. Even a slightly worse Go compiler is probably well compensated-for by denser data structure layout in the operating memory.

> Java conceptually has a lot of drawbacks

In what sense is an articulated object a "conceptual drawback"? It is a richer object model and SMI and friends had the engineering chops to makes it highly performant.

What do you mean by "a richer object model". The drawbacks are principally that the programmer has less control over allocs and layout.

If you want an actual rich object model, why aren't you using CLOS instead? Java's objects costs you a lot of potential performance with few of the benefits.

Only true until value types get productified and there are already prototype versions to play with.

Also depending on which JVM SDK is being used (Oracle Hotspot, Oracle Graal, IBM J9, HP, PTG, JET,...), the quality of escape analysis differs but it all boils down to turning those headered objects into plain structs, if possible stack allocated.

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