&gt; That aaid, one of the more interesting debates I participated in at Sun was Bill Joy&#x27;s insistence that interpreted Java would be &quot;faster than C++.&quot;<p>Today, with JDK8, that&#x27;s almost true.  With JDK9 it might be.<p>There&#x27;s no reason Java can&#x27;t be faster, it just hasn&#x27;t happened yet.