Don’t call it a comeback: Java is still champ

This is obviously false. The JVM, or any other compiler for that matter, is what translates the OOP code into CPU instructions. If it does that optimally, it won't matter what design pattern the top-level compiled language used. If it does it poorly, then it will.

> CPUs and RAM are not tailored to OOP in any way.

This is not entirely true. Intel in particular pays a lot of attention to Java performance when benchmarking processor designs, see for example https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t... .

> Procedural code will always be more efficient with CPU and RAM...

First of all, arrays vs Lists and data type sizing are orthogonal to procedural vs OO code. You can write OO code that uses arrays and procedural code that uses lists, and datatype sizing is more related to your choice of language and compiler toolchain than your design patterns.

I think what you're trying to say here is that the performance ceiling for a low level language using simple language primitives (if-else and vanilla function calls instead of classes and polymorphism) that compiles to a binary is higher than that for a high level language that compiles to an intermediate language (or an interpreted language). This is generally true for small code paths - if you need to do a bunch of matrix operations, or data crunching for a small well defined problem, you can generally do it faster in C/C++ than in Java if you put in enough effort. The ceiling part matters though - in general, you have to put in a lot of skill and development effort to realize these differences, and this often grows super-linearly with the size of your codebase for low level languages. If you have a large application that has a lot of code, your overall performance will usually be higher with a high level language because the average performance for any particular part will be much better. Sure, given infinite time and resources you could theoretically do better in C, but nobody has that.

This is reflected in the approach most professionals take in practice when it comes to perf optimization - write most of your code in a high level language like Java or Python because on average it will be faster and less buggy for any reasonable amount of developer effort. For pieces of code that absolutely have to run as fast as possible, write them in C and call out to them from the high level language.

I guess the point I'm trying to make here is lots of people choose java precisely because performance is a concern. It does better than most other high level languages out there, and your average performance for a large codebase will be much better than something like C/C++ given the same amount of effort. As others have noted, it does multithreading better than most too, which is another major performance consideration. I don't care if my Java code is half the speed of the C equivalent if I can easily run 40 cores at once - or 40000. I think languages like Rust and Swift may let us have the best of both worlds in the future, but that remains to be seen. For now, the only time lower level procedural languages win is when you need a relatively small codebase to run absolutely as fast as possible.

To me it’s always felt like some kind of assembly language humans shouldn’t deal with directly.

A more versatile set of analogirs are of course ATVs, Aircraft, or even the humble legs.