Aside from being more flexible they are mostly the same game. The original excuse for bedrock was that Java was slow and a native game would render much better, it was also easier to put shaders in a a native codebase. But Java edition is pretty performant nowadays and computers also got much more stronger than the game became heavier

▲

Philip-J-Fry a day ago | parent | next [-]

As far as I can remember the origins of Bedrock are the original console releases which couldn't ship a JVM. So a whole new codebase was developed, and ultimately it was more performant as it had to run on 7th gen consoles.

	▲	ThatPlayer a day ago \| parent [-]
		Console releases were done by a different studio originally, 4J Studios. Bedrock spawned from the mobile ports, and eventually replaced the console editions and had different features.

▲

LtdJorge a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Java edition still horribly underperforms. It’s mostly single-threaded and even if they’ve rewritten the lighting engine a few times (those decade old black-block bugs disappeared), the Sodium family of mods show you how much it can be improved.

	▲	avarun 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, but the fact that you can just install Sodium completely obviates the need for the Bedrock version to exist at all.