This text is from 2007, and compares execution speed of Java to C on one single CPU-bound benchmark.

At http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/, an up-to-date list of the most popular languages are benchmarked. Tests are standardized, and code is optimized for the tested language and particular benchmark. Also, for each benchmark, not only execution speed, but also memory consumption and code size are measured, and the processor architecture is taken into account too.