Why is the JVM slow to start?

Question

What exactly makes the JVM (in particular, Sun\'s implementation) slow to get running compared to other runtimes like CPython? My impression was that it mainly has to do wit

Answer 1

Here is what Wikipedia has to say on the issue (with some references).

It appears that most of the time is taken just loading data (classes) from disk (i.e. startup time is I/O bound).