Actually, as far as VMs go, the JVM is fairly spare in comparison with earlier versions of Ruby and Python -- on a per object basis. (Because of its Smalltalk roots. Yes, I had to get that in there. Drink!) That said, I've seen those horrors of cargo-cult imitation of the Gang of Four patterns, resulting in my having to instantiate 7 freaking objects to send one JMS message.
If practice in recent decades has taught us anything, it's that performance is found in intelligently using the cache. In a multi-core concurrent world, our tools should be biased towards pass by value, allocation on the stack/avoiding allocating on the heap, and avoiding chasing pointers and branching just to facilitate code organization.
EDIT: Or, as placybordeaux puts it more succinctly in a nephew comment, "VM or culture? It's the culture."
EDIT: It just occurred to me -- Programming suffers from a worship of Context-Free "Clever"!
Whether or not a particular pattern or decision is smart is highly dependent on context. (In the general sense, not the function call one.) The difficulty with programming, is that often context is very involved and hard to convey in media. As a result, a whole lot of arguments are made for or against patterns/paradigms/languages using largely context free examples.
This is why we end up in so many meaningless arguments akin to, "What is the ultimate bladed weapon?" That's simply a meaningless question, because the effectiveness of such items is very highly dependent on context. (Look up Matt Easton on YouTube.)
The analogy works in terms of the degree of fanboi nonsense.
If practice in recent decades has taught us anything, it's that performance is found in intelligently using the cache. In a multi-core concurrent world, our tools should be biased towards pass by value, allocation on the stack/avoiding allocating on the heap, and avoiding chasing pointers and branching just to facilitate code organization.
EDIT: Or, as placybordeaux puts it more succinctly in a nephew comment, "VM or culture? It's the culture."
EDIT: It just occurred to me -- Programming suffers from a worship of Context-Free "Clever"!
Whether or not a particular pattern or decision is smart is highly dependent on context. (In the general sense, not the function call one.) The difficulty with programming, is that often context is very involved and hard to convey in media. As a result, a whole lot of arguments are made for or against patterns/paradigms/languages using largely context free examples.
This is why we end up in so many meaningless arguments akin to, "What is the ultimate bladed weapon?" That's simply a meaningless question, because the effectiveness of such items is very highly dependent on context. (Look up Matt Easton on YouTube.)
The analogy works in terms of the degree of fanboi nonsense.