> This isn't so much Java vs. Go as it is JIT/interpreted vs. AOT-compiled. The numbers are entirely typical across a wide range of such comparisons. > [...] while an app written in C++, Rust, or Go will take 2MB. Agreed. As mentioned in the blog post, I considered Rust but decided against it because of I found it much less mature than Go. I did not consider C++ because, as mentioned in the blog post, part of the point was to experiment with new language/tools and even though I consider myself proficient with it, I learned the hard way that the lack of memory safety is rarely worth it.

> I suspect that the 668MB Java image was at least 90% unnecessary garbage that was not actually needed at runtime. Unfortunately the package managers we all use are not optimized for containers Exactly. That was part of the point of this blog post, which I may not have been successful at getting across. Switching to go was, if not the path of least resistance to solve this issue, at least one of a few relatively easy routes. It also happened to be a great deal of fun.