Honest question: what do you consider the advantages of the JVM over native code?
Snapshot and release builds of our build server are distributed via a Nexus-managed repository. So, everyone codes against exactly the same dependencies, regardless of the platform.
- Hotswapping/JRebel.
- Good interoperability with other languages. E.g. the Typesafe folks implemented Akka in Scala. Java gets it for (well, almost) free.
- Easy monitoring and instrumentation.
Obviously, there are downsides as well, such as startup times (twofold: starting the VM and Hotspot detection/compilation), preset heap size, expensive JNI (native interface), etc.
Well, so Go is "write once, build 3-9x, run anywhere".. close enough ;)
But Java bytecode execution is definitely not slow and usually within 2x the execution time of a C implementation, which is faster than the vast majority of other language implementations.
[1] At least in the language benchmarks game. Yes, I know that microbenchmarks are not representative, etc. etc. etc. (Until your favorite language is faster ;).)
A community that's converged on a deterministic, crossplatform way of representing library dependencies (maven).
An ABI that includes a notion of objects, which makes cross-language interoperability with objects easier (though counterbalanced by not having a cross-language notion of functions).
But also performance. JVM can be faster than say C/C++ code in many cases.