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Java has come a loooong way since 1996 ! JRE is pretty standardized now, and in terms of execution speed it’s comparable to C++ and in some cases even slightly better.

I think you were referring to applets earlier, where different versions came over the network and ran on the browser’s JVM. Applets are long gone. Good riddance. They were a real PITA to work with. Today Java exists mostly for server side computing, for which in terms of flexibility, architectural frameworks, integration with third party APIs and packages, available open source tools , it has no equal. Developers have an extremely rich environment to work in. The Java of 2009 is nothing like that of 1996, believe me.

In what cases does java execute faster than C++?

Cuz I aint buying it. Not by a long shot.

I work on a project that started out as pure C++. The source code base was under 5 MB as pulled from an SVN repository. There was a cool moving map (tied to GPS) display that was desired by certain persons on the project. The code was written in Java. That became an excuse to reimplement the display as a Java application. Inside a couple of weeks, the SVN extract into the sandbox was over 450 MB. We had code that was a mix of Java/C++. It was necessary to bring in Eclipse (another 500 MB of disk space) and SWIG to build the damn thing.

The Java of 2009 is fatter and uglier than what I left behind in 2000. It's certainly the last thing I would put on an embedded system. Conversely, the gcc/g++ compilers continue to get better. The code is getting smaller and faster. Exactly what I want in an embedded system.