Java creator defends software performance

James Gosling, the Sun Microsystems programmer who was instrumental in the creation and development of Java, has spoken up in defense of the performance of the software technology.

On his blog Sunday, Gosling pointed to a discussion on the Slashdot "News for Nerds" site about myths of Java's sluggishness.

Java is a programming language and an accompanying runtime environment that executes programs written in Java. Because the runtime environment is available for many different operating systems and processors, programming in Java means that software may more easily run on different types of computers. But there are concerns that Java components, such as the virtual machine software that executes Java programs, is pokey. Not so, said Gosling.

"Modern Java VMs (virtual machines) really are quite fast, often beating C and C++ in all sorts of benchmarks," he said.

Java performance isn't perfect, though. "The one place where Java does have a legitimate remaining performance issue is startup time," he said. Most of that startup delay is from loading the Java application, however, not the Java virtual machine that runs the application, he said.