Comment by dethstar

From the site:

"There's a good comparison to be made with java, as they had similar design goals:

    good performance (within an order of magnitude of C)
    cross platform / virtual machine based (WriteOnceRunAnywhere, except actually delivered this time)
    safe execution of untrusted code
    powerful network / browser focus 

However, they diverged in a few areas (probably to their advantage):

    register based byte-code (as opposed to stack based), maps well to existing processors, JIT compilation works much better
    supported as a native operating system (i.e., it'll easily run on bare hardware, for many values of hardware)"