# Java Virtual Machine

42 Hacker News commenters recommended Java Virtual Machine and 23 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Mature, fast runtime with strong garbage collection, tooling and an ecosystem that runs many languages. Critics point to slow startup, warm-up and heavy memory use.

## Why people recommend it

- Strong performance and JIT compilation (7 comments): "The JVM proved to the mainstream that a virtual machine good be as fast (sometimes even faster) than a compiled binary." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46190090)) "it provides absurdly good performance and more packages than pretty much all three of these languages combined" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48890121)) "It's one of the fastest VMs out there and is one of the most customizable ones as well." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48461824))
- Mature GC, tooling and ecosystem (5 comments): "The productivity the JVM provides is second to none, including observability and state of the art GCs." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49869044)) "The JVM in particular is a very robust host and there's a large ecosystem for it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46069139)) "Threads that really work and a good garbage collector for instance." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47799311))
- Runs many languages on many platforms (4 comments): "The value, of course, comes from having a generic machine that you can then compile down into whatever machine code you want." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46190215)) "Where you can run JVM, there's a pretty good chance you can run your app." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49713217)) "Garbage collection is also an option. Lots of backends on the JVM!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50186589))
- Stable and backward compatible (2 comments): "Whatever you produce that can run on the JVM will still be runnable in 30 years." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47995650)) "the platform itself is extremely backwards compatible" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47971817))

## What people warn about

- Slow startup and warm-up (4 comments): "It loads slowly, takes a while to warm up, generally needs a lot of memory and the runtime is large and idiosyncratic." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47764104)) "The only thing worse than launching the JVM from the command line, with it's looooooooooooong and inexplicable load time" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46189804)) "Java's vm does not start in milliseconds nor has dozen independent implementations in every ecosystem" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48488105))
- Heavy memory use (4 comments): "It loads slowly, takes a while to warm up, generally needs a lot of memory and the runtime is large and idiosyncratic." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47764104)) "And it hogs all your RAM or runs out of heap space, and online help says to pass more -Xmxwhatever flags" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46191875)) "the lack of value types is a big contributor to why Java uses so much memory" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47564179))
- Slower than native code (3 comments): "The JVM is amazing technology for what it is, but what it is still limits how fast it can go." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50303880)) "it's still so immensely wasteful compared to something well written running native" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49762545)) "why JVM sucks, and why GO's approach to minimize GC pause latency is far superior" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49133077))
- Crashes across versions and platforms (2 comments): "JVM straight up crashed when Rosetta 2 was released and few years later it worked but with huge performance drop." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46295999)) "Minor version differences in the JVM result in unpredictable crashes." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47969366))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [.NET](https://hackerapproved.com/p/net.md): 293 recommend
- [BEAM (Erlang VM)](https://hackerapproved.com/p/beam.md): 80 recommend
- [JVM](https://hackerapproved.com/p/jvm.md): 39 recommend
- [GraalVM](https://hackerapproved.com/p/graalvm.md): 33 recommend
- [libgodc](https://hackerapproved.com/p/libgodc.md): 13 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Java Virtual Machine", https://hackerapproved.com/p/java-virtual-machine/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).