[shub]

In addition, a lot of the techniques used to write high-performance Java boil down to "write it like C". Avoid interfaces, avoid polymorphic virtual calls (as you can't avoid virtuals entirely), avoid complex object graphs, avoid allocating as much as possible...it's not nearly as nice as naive Java. Still nicer than C IMO. If your process segfaults you can know for certain that it's a platform bug.

[zmmmmm]

The other thing that makes Java nicer than C is the ease and depth with which you can profile it to discover where the bottlenecks actually are. While it's certainly possible to profile in both cases, the runtime reflective and instrumentation capabilities of the JVM really add a lot of power to it.