Definitely worth trying--I've used it for the same purpose, and the only performance issue has been a slow startup time (several seconds to load standard libraries).
Do you know if it's possible to have the loading of the standard libraries offloaded to a separate thread? For example, if I have a program that displays a UI, can I have a progress bar or loading message (or even basic interactivity) using Java code while another thread gets the scripting part of the application spun up?
