JVM-Hosted Languages: They Talk the Talk, but do they Walk the Walk?

The rapid adoption of non-Java JVM languages is impressive: ma-jor international corporations are staking critical parts of their soft-ware infrastructure on components built from languages such as Scala and Clojure. However with the possible exception of Scala, there has been little academic consideration and characterization of these languages to date. In this paper, we examine four non-Java JVM languages and use exploratory data analysis techniques to investigate differences in their dynamic behavior compared to Java. We analyse a variety of programs and levels of behavior to draw distinctions between the different programming languages. We briefly discuss the implications of our findings for improving the performance of JIT compilation and garbage collection on the JVM platform