I find it interesting that when folks want to claim that .NET is crossplatform they cite Mono, but when performance is discussed they are only prepared to discuss the performance of the MS Windows implementation provided by MS. The last time I benchmarked .NET (on Windows) it was significantly slower than java (with -server flag), but their EULA forbid publishing benchmark results at the time (was a long time ago, but since the parent is discussing .NET v1.0 and it's creation...)