Go the language now is indeed very similar to Java pre-1.5, but with a better OOP story, and a much better concurrency story.

I still think that JVM + JIT is hugely important, though. Now it's importance is somehow diminished by presence of LLVM, but 20 and even 10 years ago the situation with native compilation was different. (I know that the canonical Go compiler does not use LLVM.)

Oberon, Eiffel and Common Lisp already had VM/JIT + AOT.

When Java came around, latest Oberon variant was Active Oberon (Active Objects are similar to goroutines), then we had Eiffel and Modula-3 as well.

Hence why I say it should have been Java 1.0.

and a much smaller heap.

Ironically, java 1.0 had green threads.