That&#x27;s my understanding as well. This is the reason why you are caught between the rock and a hard place on the Hadoop stack. Java code wont be efficient in terms of FLOPs and a popular and often effective escape hatch: code number crunching parts in C, C++ or Fortran, is also not very effective &#x2F; convenient. Particularly so if it requires going back and forth over the bridge frequently because crossing the bridge has significant overhead. So typically you have to move majority of the core into the high performant language of choice and what remains is glue. If gluing is what I want to do, there are other languages that can give Java stiff competition. The core capability thing going for Java in this domain is HDFS, and its not that great a file system for big data.