Quote Originally Posted by Darkhog View Post
Case in point: Blockscape, which is minecraft-inspired game with MUCH higher level of detail and written in C# is much faster than Minecraft for most players (Minecraft's FPS:17-25 at max, Blockscape's: 60-120). Both are bytecode, and yet C# is faster there.
You do know that Minecraft graphical engine is not the best one. Yes it has improved quite a bit in past years but still not enough. But there was a HD graphics mod for Minecraft which actually raised Minecraft FPS way abouve 60 and this on almost every computer with decent graphics card.

Another problem in Minecraft is that its core is quite porly written and can lead to lower FPS. You can clearly see this by the fact that you are getting way higher FPS and much lower CPU utilization when playing Multiplayr in comparison of playing Singleplayer game. And yes Minecraft performance went down again quite a bit in newer versions.
Now several mod packs like Technic Pack and such actually change part of default Minecraft code to make it much faster. Notch doesn't put much on optimization.

So using comparison of Minecraft with Blockscape to determine wheter JAVA is so much slower than native code is not best idea.
Best idea would be to write some benchmarking tests for true comparison.