Both Erlang VM and HiPE are written in C, which powers.. The point is not who powers which software program, the point is that you cannot write operating systems and drivers in Java. I hope you realize that Java gets run inside a vritual machine. And so is Erlang. Also C and C++ power a number substantially bigger than "a 3d software program", if you want to put it like that, which isn't the point..

A virtual machine means nothing. There exists chips that natively run Java and you could in principle run x86 on a PPC with a suitable virtual machine.

And realtime Java does allow you to specify drivers.

The Symbolics Lisp Machine ran everything in Lisp, top to bottom.

> Java with a jit compiler

The JRE is substantially C++.

Not all JREs are - Jikes RVM for example is implemented in Java and yet has decent performance -

http://jikesrvm.org/FAQ#FAQ-GeneralWhatIs

The speed-critical parts (like HotSpot) are most certainly written in C++.

From TFA I linked -

Jikes RVM is unique in that it is the first self-bootstrapped virtual machine written entirely in the Java programming language, i.e., its Java code runs on itself, without requiring a second virtual machine.