In theory, yes. JVM executes Java bytecode, and as long as you can transform the script language to proper bytecode (as javac does for Java) JVM can achieve similar performance as Java. However, in practice, this is not easy, especially for dynamic languages like Python. The first part of Charles Nutter's (author of JRuby) blog () has a detailed description of this problem. The dynamic type has limited the optimizations JVM can do. In Jython (an implementation of Python on JVM) every runtime object has to be an instance of PyObject or its subclass. A simple integer addition x + y needs to first check x and y's types, then unbox x and y from PyObject to int, add x and y, and lastly box the result to a PyObject. This is definitely slower than Java which only need to perform a single int x + int y. Runtime method binding is another big factor that slows down the JVM - neither reflection nor invokedynamic is good enough performancewise.I had been worked on another Python implementation on JVM about two years ago called Zippy (), which uses Oracle lab's Truffle infrastructure. During that time, we compared performance of various Python implementations on selected benchmarks, and Jython was far away from getting Java-like performance. On benchmarks we used, Jython didn't even outperform CPython. I don't know the current status of Jython, but I think they still need lots of work to get better and better performance. In my opinion, JVM is a great platform to implement high level languages. It offers GC, multithread, and other runtimes almost for free. But to achieve a peak performance as Java on JVM, there still needs a lot of work.