There's also various operating systems (
JavaOS in particular) and various processors (
picojava for one) that use Java for either the base of the operating system or as the basic instruction set architecture of the processor.
In the last few years, Java has become a lot faster. I don't know when you first used it, but the HotSpot recompiler is MUCH faster than it used to be (and likely orders of magnitude faster than the old interpreter). With the recompiler profiling on the fly, it could probably do better than some compilers (especially if the user doesn't enable any optimizations).
That said, I still don't like Java. The both the language and the standard library are a pain. The inability to access native code easily, serialization over network, etc. C# is a bit better, but not by much. I had been working on a new language for a while, but organizing a parser became somewhat boring and I got sidetracked. [/url]