JVM
Ranked 4 of 11 language runtimes by recommenders
Mature, fast runtime with strong garbage collectors, observability and a huge library ecosystem; critics say it uses a lot of memory and its tooling is frustrating.
Mature, fast runtime with strong garbage collectors, observability and a huge library ecosystem; critics say it uses a lot of memory and its tooling is frustrating.
61 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 39
- criticize it
- 22
- approval share
- 64%
Recommended in 11 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 39 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1.7 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 11 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Virtual threads for high concurrency
“the JVM and the BEAM are still better able to handle the types of high-traffic, high-concurrency workloads”
Comment from 4 Jun 2026 in “Elixir v1.20 released: now a gradually typed language” “JVM has real and virtual threads and arguably just as good if not better on all these points.”
Comment from 13 Aug 2026 in “DeepSeek Harness” “They just released virtual threads, which are ridiculously awesome”
Comment from 2 Nov 2025 in “Lisp: Notes on its Past and Future (1980)” - Comment from 3 Jun 2026 in “My thoughts after using Clojure for about a month”
Excellent garbage collectors
“GC available on JVM and CLR runtimes are much more advanced than WASM GC will ever be.”
Comment from 8 Mar 2026 in “Notes on Writing WASM” “the JVM does a superior job at optimization and has superior GCs”
Comment from 26 Sep 2026 on Hacker News “superior GCs, optimization, speed, and observability”
Comment from 2 Jun 2026 in “Go: Support for Generic Methods” - Comment from 19 Apr 2026 in “Modern Common Lisp with FSET”
Fast, mature, heavily optimized runtime
“JVM runtime is undeniably the most well researched and optimized runtime in history of runtimes”
Comment from 3 Jun 2026 in “My thoughts after using Clojure for about a month” “the JVM does a superior job at optimization and has superior GCs”
Comment from 26 Sep 2026 on Hacker News “The JVM has been extremely fast for a long long time now.”
Comment from 14 Apr 2026 in “Someone Bought 30 WordPress Plugins and Planted a Backdoor in All of Them” - Comment from 12 Apr 2026 in “JVM Options Explorer”
Large ecosystem and deployment experience
“Being able to leverage the extensive JVM ecosystem is an enormous advantage for any real business”
Comment from 2 Apr 2026 in “Bringing Clojure programming to Enterprise (2021)” “first class development experience, and decades of deployment experience”
Comment from 27 May 2026 in “Cloudflare Flagship”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
High memory and resource use
“it's challenging to write high-performing and memory-efficient code on the JVM in general”
Comment from 30 Jan 2026 in “The Sovereign Tech Fund Invests in Scala” “The cherry on the cake is the huge hog of an runtime called the JVM.”
Comment from 1 Aug 2026 in “Golang proposal: container/: generic collection types” “I wish JVM could at least recover the memory after some time”
Comment from 11 Sep 2026 in “JEP 544: Ahead-of-Time Code Compilation” - Comment from 13 Aug 2026 in “DeepSeek Harness”
- Comment from 13 Aug 2026 in “DeepSeek Harness”
- Comment from 15 Sep 2026 in “Java 27”
Build and tooling are frustrating
“this rules out the JVM which has the worst build system and package repositories I've ever had the displeasure of needing to use.”
Comment from 3 Dec 2025 in “Anthropic acquires Bun” “I have found the jvm ecosystem terrible for observability.”
Comment from 18 Oct 2026 in “JDK 28” “I'd rather built it myself than tangle with JVM tooling”
Comment from 10 Aug 2026 in “Because It's Not Fun Enough: why languages fail”
Other language runtimes people recommend
The four most recommended other language runtimes, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| .NET | 293 | 148 | 66% | 12 | 10 yrs28 owners | — |
| BEAM (Erlang VM) | 80 | 25 | 76% | 11 | — | Approved |
| Java Virtual Machine | 42 | 23 | 65% | 12 | — | — |
| JVMThis page | 39 | 22 | 64% | 11 | — | — |
| GraalVM | 33 | 18 | 65% | 12 | — | — |
What people said
40 of the 75 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“well spec'd languages like Java and runtimes like the JVM in the age of AI”
“I have found the jvm ecosystem terrible for observability.”
“the JVM does a superior job at optimization and has superior GCs”
“It comes with tradeoffs, but those most affect small or short-lived programs.”
“JVM requires so many resources just to run small apps.”
“I wish JVM could at least recover the memory after some time”
“It might sound like hyperbole but it's reasonable to state that JVM and .net core have no competition”
“The JVM is/was terrible on freeing allocated memory though.”
“The JVM has a fixed size heap which for me it is wasteful.”
“JVM has real and virtual threads and arguably just as good if not better on all these points.”
“I'd rather built it myself than tangle with JVM tooling”
“The cherry on the cake is the huge hog of an runtime called the JVM.”
“I appreciate you making the argument for the JVM delivering performant code when a budget matters.”
“the JVM and the BEAM are still better able to handle the types of high-traffic, high-concurrency workloads”
“The JVM is perfectly capable of Golang-style green threads now”
“JVM runtime is undeniably the most well researched and optimized runtime in history of runtimes”
“superior GCs, optimization, speed, and observability”
“first class development experience, and decades of deployment experience”
“All the other languages just leak their abstractions to you, java quietly doesn't.”
“the high performance of the available gc in the JVM”
“The JVM has been extremely fast for a long long time now.”
“we can sit back and watch the bytecode instructions fly by as they execute”
“yet another flag to control exactly the timing of GC pauses”
“the JVM is mature and I think generally respected”
“JITs just have too many opportunities for optimizing generated code.”
“At this point, the JVM is a civilizational technology.”
“Being able to leverage the extensive JVM ecosystem is an enormous advantage for any real business”
“there isn't THE JVM, rather a bunch of versions each with their own approaches to GC, JIT, JIT caches, ahead of time compilation.”
“On the JVM the tooling for all kinds of observability is immensely better.”
“GC available on JVM and CLR runtimes are much more advanced than WASM GC will ever be.”
“it's challenging to write high-performing and memory-efficient code on the JVM in general”
“the JVM is more lively as the original goal of the CLR”
“The JVM is a much more general technology than WASM is”
“Pick up some JVM, .NET, Rust, Go, etc if you really want strong types.”
“These problems are effectively solved on beam, the jvm, rust, go, etc.”
“given the engineering effort that went into JVM across various Java vendors”
“this rules out the JVM which has the worst build system and package repositories I've ever had the displeasure of needing to use.”
“The JVM that also runs more advanced langages with a JIT that alleviates some of the loss of performance”
“plus its jvm which means for your desktop use cases it works.”
“They just released virtual threads, which are ridiculously awesome”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.