The only problem Java has is experienced C programmers don't build servers from scratch with it yet.
Once they take that responsibility, the debate will be over because:
"While I'm on the topic of concurrency I should mention my far too brief chat with Doug Lea. He commented that multi-threaded Java these days far outperforms C, due to the memory management and a garbage collector. If I recall correctly he said "only 12 times faster than C means you haven't started optimizing"." - Martin Fowler https://martinfowler.com/bliki/OOPSLA2005.html
"Many lock-free structures offer atomic-free read paths, notably concurrent containers in garbage collected languages, such as ConcurrentHashMap in Java. Languages without garbage collection have fewer straightforward options, mostly because safe memory reclamation is a hard problem..." - Travis Downs https://travisdowns.github.io/blog/2020/07/06/concurrency-co...
"Inspired by the apparent success of Java's new memory model, many of the same people set out to define a similar memory model for C++, eventually adopted in C++11." - https://research.swtch.com/plmm
This combined with the fact that Java doesn't crash and you can easily hot-deploy the classloader (maybe 100 lines) means nothing can compete that doesn't copy everything Java does VM + GC (hello C#, please don't downvote).
To use anything else (than JavaSE without heavy deps.) on the server is madness.
Once they take that responsibility, the debate will be over because:
"While I'm on the topic of concurrency I should mention my far too brief chat with Doug Lea. He commented that multi-threaded Java these days far outperforms C, due to the memory management and a garbage collector. If I recall correctly he said "only 12 times faster than C means you haven't started optimizing"." - Martin Fowler https://martinfowler.com/bliki/OOPSLA2005.html
"Many lock-free structures offer atomic-free read paths, notably concurrent containers in garbage collected languages, such as ConcurrentHashMap in Java. Languages without garbage collection have fewer straightforward options, mostly because safe memory reclamation is a hard problem..." - Travis Downs https://travisdowns.github.io/blog/2020/07/06/concurrency-co...
"Inspired by the apparent success of Java's new memory model, many of the same people set out to define a similar memory model for C++, eventually adopted in C++11." - https://research.swtch.com/plmm
This combined with the fact that Java doesn't crash and you can easily hot-deploy the classloader (maybe 100 lines) means nothing can compete that doesn't copy everything Java does VM + GC (hello C#, please don't downvote).
To use anything else (than JavaSE without heavy deps.) on the server is madness.