Not using the state of the art will give a bad impression, yes.
There are plenty of very fast dynamic language runtimes: LuaJIT, PyPy, Spidermonkey, V8, SBCL, etc. They're all competitive with JVMs and some are consistently faster.
Dalvik avoided the state of the art on purpose, for some reason. It didn't even have a JIT by default until Android 2!
There are quite a few decent GCs out there, Dalvik's merely had almost no work put into it.
I think you misunderstood the point I was trying to make.
Sure, there are good GCs out there, but good GCs are harder than many GC proponents make out.
Take the top 100 most heavily used applications or platforms that rely on garbage collection. What fraction of them actually use decent GC implementations?
Also, you seemingly misread my other point about dynamic language runtimes, I wasn't comparing them to JVMs, I was comparing them to compiled code written in lower level systems languages (like C/C++). V8 may be fast, but it's not as fast as compiled code, yet. There's still a huge gap between theory and practice there.
There are plenty of very fast dynamic language runtimes: LuaJIT, PyPy, Spidermonkey, V8, SBCL, etc. They're all competitive with JVMs and some are consistently faster.
Dalvik avoided the state of the art on purpose, for some reason. It didn't even have a JIT by default until Android 2!
There are quite a few decent GCs out there, Dalvik's merely had almost no work put into it.