> the performance of Java has to be the best-kept secret in the industry
Is it, though? It's the first language of choice for a large number, if not most performance-critical applications.
> Because you are the only person I've ever heard making such claims seriously.
Your sources must be very limited, then, because in serious compiler and runtime design and memory management circles this is quite common. There is a debate, but it is an empirical one over whether the circumstances that favour Java over C++ are more or less common in practice or vice-versa. And again, given that it's the first language of choice in most performance-critical applications (and even if you don't believe it's number one, surely you agree it's in the top two or three) one or two more people probably think its performance is at least competitive with C++.
> But in more traditional performance-critical work, such as HPC or video game engines, there are usually only a limited number of distinct combinations of performance-critical tasks that can be active at the same time
I wouldn't say HPC and video game engines are "traditional performance critical work". Not because they're not performance critical, but because the range of performance critical programs is far larger - think bank card transaction processing; think mobile phone routing, and there are many more examples (also, AAA video game engines are indeed very traditional in their design and tech choices, but their performance-sensitivity these days is not so much around CPU-related optimisations but about scheduling the GPU, and their tech choices are much more constrained by the consoles they need to support than by performance).
Is it, though? It's the first language of choice for a large number, if not most performance-critical applications.
> Because you are the only person I've ever heard making such claims seriously.
Your sources must be very limited, then, because in serious compiler and runtime design and memory management circles this is quite common. There is a debate, but it is an empirical one over whether the circumstances that favour Java over C++ are more or less common in practice or vice-versa. And again, given that it's the first language of choice in most performance-critical applications (and even if you don't believe it's number one, surely you agree it's in the top two or three) one or two more people probably think its performance is at least competitive with C++.
> But in more traditional performance-critical work, such as HPC or video game engines, there are usually only a limited number of distinct combinations of performance-critical tasks that can be active at the same time
I wouldn't say HPC and video game engines are "traditional performance critical work". Not because they're not performance critical, but because the range of performance critical programs is far larger - think bank card transaction processing; think mobile phone routing, and there are many more examples (also, AAA video game engines are indeed very traditional in their design and tech choices, but their performance-sensitivity these days is not so much around CPU-related optimisations but about scheduling the GPU, and their tech choices are much more constrained by the consoles they need to support than by performance).