JAVA vs. The World

willhelm asks: "I have a friend--and his boss, in a stroke of wisdom, has asked for any kind of "hard numbers" comparing Java to VB. Java being an interpreted language, is probably much slower than VB. However, theory and high-faluttin' rhertoric mean nothing to him. So I looked around and didn't find much, probably because there aren't a whole lot of applications that were written in Java and some other language. Are there any studies on performance of Java applications vs. other common application programming languages like C, C++, Delphi, VB and others like them?" Let's try and answer this one without rabid advocacy, please!