[abofh]

Java yes over JVM/bytecode, the rest were all largely interpreted languages and so the discussion focused on if an interpreted language could ever compare to a compiled one.

But much as there's an indignity to something compiling to JS or your own preferred VM, people were convinced that memory allocation/GC is the reason they got a job and tended to object accordingly - so there was fight against that. Rust is treated by the hard-core C-ists as an affront to their ability to manage memory safely. Go look up early go vs C (or C#, D) - it had its own animated themes, but this was before GG went fucky with its own open source stuff so there was an air of 'google is trustworthy' in those discussions.

TLDR: Yes.