I would say that JAVA does far better than "a sporting try". My experience with JAVA 2 is that it is very portable between SUN, AIX, LINUX and of course Windows. I have not tried the new Macintosh yet, but it also looks good. The days of write once test everwhere are gone. Now it is write once deploy to ALMOST everywhere. The last argument of the VM being too slow is also gone. The modern VM's with modern JITS(Hotspot) has made the performance very close to C (if not better). The only time I see performance being an issue would be in a graphical application (game) that cannot allow garbage collection to run.
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I would say that JAVA does far better than "a sporting try". My experience with JAVA 2 is that it is very portable between SUN, AIX, LINUX and of course Windows. I have not tried the new Macintosh yet, but it also looks good. The days of write once test everwhere are gone. Now it is write once deploy to ALMOST everywhere.
The last argument of the VM being too slow is also gone. The modern VM's with modern JITS(Hotspot) has made the performance very close to C (if not better). The only time I see performance being an issue would be in a graphical application (game) that cannot allow garbage collection to run.