I was curious about the results reported here, which reports that Scala's mutable maps are slower than Java's: http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/11/yammer-scala
In my tests, Scala's OpenHashMap equals or beats java's HashMap:
Insertion 100k elements (String keys) time in ms:
- scala HashMap: 92.75
- scala OpenHashMap: 14.03125
- java HashMap: 15.78125