Java theoretically taking a lot of care not to use excessive memory. It loads classes on demand, it compiles bytecode only when this path is really hot. I don't really see why it's necessary to use 16MB RAM. Golang has GC and doesn't that much memory. Lua has an entire virtual machine and runtime and doesn't use that much memory either. It's not a valid argument. I still believe that current JVM developers just don't care that much about memory consumption which is a valid decision, but I don't like it anyway. Not everyone has 8+GB of RAM. I have 256 MB VPS which runs quite a few of network services and has half of memory free, but I don't think that I could afford Java if I want to run something there, even if my load is tiny.