For speed you do have to go to C or assembler

You certainly don't have to drop that far. I certainly wouldn't entertain doing much of anything in a language that doesn't support automatic memory management.

Well, that was a 'turning of the knob' thing -- how fast do you need to go? Can you write the thing in Perl and thing do some performance analysis to find the hot spots, then code those bits in C to get the speed up?

Maybe that's a necessary penalty for the benefits of using a dynamic language, but even without jit, Java seems to do a whole lot better.

Perhaps, but Java just seems to be so clumsy and backwards to me -- I love the simplicity of C. You know exactly where you are at all times. If necessary, I'd probably build some OO routines and 'pretend' to do C++; just pass Container objects around that hold onto the collection of objects that I'm working on.

But this is a conversation that's tough to do over PM posts and morning coffee when it could be much more fun over a beer and face to face.