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Remember the hub-ub of "Java is slow" back in the 1.x days?

Remember the buzz when .NET had the stack vs. heap 'struct' world?

Brian Goetz is here to discuss Urban performance legends, revisited.

Brian gets down and dirty, and will amaze you with quips like:

Pop quiz: Which language boasts faster raw allocation performance, the Java language, or C/C++? The answer may surprise you -- allocation in modern JVMs is far faster than the best performing malloc implementations. The common code path for new Object() in HotSpot 1.4.2 and later is approximately 10 machine instructions (data provided by Sun; see Resources), whereas the best performing malloc implementations in C require on average between 60 and 100 instructions per call (Detlefs, et. al.; see Resources). And allocation performance is not a trivial component of overall performance -- benchmarks show that many real-world C and C++ programs, such as Perl and Ghostscript, spend 20 to 30 percent of their total execution time in malloc and

free -- far more than the allocation and garbage
collection overhead of a healthy Java application (Zorn; see
Resources).

Give it a read, and don't say "Java is slow". Well, what about embedded devices, can we still say that realtime java isn't quite there?