You can have it all in the vast majority of cases. It just requires a lot of work. See: The Hotspot JVM.

Totally agree; we're approaching a time where a single processor has hundreds of threads - it's a conceptual limitation of the author's preferred language that was never considered due to it's ancient 75-ish year old design. "Use the right tool for the job" has never been more important, versus "I have a hammer, everything is a nail"

Or, almost no work, see erlang gen_server.