We're not happy about the restriction either, and hopefully we'll run a Battlecode that doesn't have a programming language restriction, but we haven't found a way to deal with limited instruction count execution that we are happy with that is machine independent, and counting Java bytecode has worked for us so far.
If there are other JVM languages people want supported, we'd be happy to take pull requests on Github once we make the new gameplay public tomorrow.
If there are other JVM languages people want supported, we'd be happy to take pull requests on Github once we make the new gameplay public tomorrow.