The JVM is not that heavy
Interesting that all the comparisons were with server frameworks. As if anybody ever cared about a few hundred megabytes of overhead on a server. Hell, even a bloated JVM implementation fits in most server L3 caches.<p>On the desktop, laptop, phone, or embedded environment, the JVM <i>is</i> heavy. It starts up slow, jars carry around ridiculous amounts of dead dependencies, garbage collectors require immense amounts of tuning, etc. And we shouldn&#x27;t really expect otherwise. If you can&#x27;t even keep your VM in cache, how are you supposed to have fast application code?<p>Specialty closed source JVM vendors have done wonders in terms of improving this problem...but it&#x27;s still an uphill battle. AOT native compilation down to machine code is becoming more popular <i>because of</i> the proliferation of resource-constrained environments, and it will take time for new languages&#x2F;compilers to take over, but take over they will.