any language, which can beat java

[Punit Jain]

basically i wanted to know, is any language which can beat java, in any of the factors (ie. performance).
i wanted to present something in front of my team, for that i am thinking to learn any new language which is better than java?
what are your opinions?

[nir sharma]

No comments on which language is better or worse as I'm a bit partial towards java.
You can consider c# or php. Both appeared after java, and c# appeared in some 2000-01.

nir

[rohit chavan]

What kind of application you are putting in here and what you want to achieve will surely impact the choice of language.
If performance is your area of concern, going with the native language would help, depending on what exactly you are planning to do.
But as far as I know, Java is the best bet for working with Collections / Threads. It is an overall winner, thats why we see Java everywhere.

[Punit Jain]

Thanks for replying.
but i wanted to know any of jvm language, which could beat java in any area?
also search on google, but didn't found any which can beat, wanted to know ranchers view.

[fred rosenberger]

Questions of the nature "Which language is better" strike me as saying "which hand tool is better?" The answer depend on whether you want to pound in a nail or tighten a nut. A hammer is great in one situation, and worthless in another.

There is no universal answer. There may be a language that can "beat java" (whatever that means) in some situations, but not all. Your biggest factor will most likely be the person writing the code. Let's say a language CAN beat java - if you don't know how to use it properly, it may not. Even if someone does know how to tune it so that it does, the cost may be so convoluted and obscure in how things are done that you loose any potential gains in time and money in maintenance.

In my personal, humble opinion, these questions are pointless.

[Amit Ghorpade]

In addition to what fred said, the "best" language would be the processor's instruction set itself.
Write it by hand with the best optimization and implementation possible as compilers are of generic nature.
That I think can beat any other language depending on the expertise of the coder.

Just my 2 cents ;)

[Joe Ess]

Computer Language Shootout has some interesting figures. Note that Java does well, even compared to compiled C and C++. I'm sure C# would do better if the test systems were Windows rather than Debian.
Keep in mind these benchmarks are for computationally intense tasks. For real-world applications that are bound by IO instead of CPU, I'd expect the performance to be far more similar among languages.
As Fred mentioned, one possible variable is going to be the programmer. These benchmarks test a number of solutions by a variety of programmers, so you can see this effect in the range of results for a particular benchmark and language.