Quite the opposite, and the reason is that you can't extrapolate from small programs to large ones. Low-level languages (like C++) incur some significant overheads as they grow large (because of essential constraints of low-level languages that prevent them from doing certain optimisations that matter mostly in large programs), and these are exactly the overheads the JVM is designed to reduce. In small or short-lived programs, the situation is different, because Java does have some warmup costs and some fixed memory overheads that matter when you're small or short-lived. Go's compiler and GC are pretty basic, and are certainly good enough for smaller things, but don't scale as well to high workloads. Just the other day a colleague tested Caffeine, an old and well-established Java caching library, and Moka, a Rust caching library with the same workload. Caffeine had the same latency as Moka across all percentiles at twice the throughput.