GraalVM native compilation works really well. Many projects will compile to native out of the box. Many more with a bit of reflection config that's autogenerated. The native executables are slim, statically linked so they "just work", and startup instantly as one would expect.

Scala is now a great choice for CLI tools.

I'm hoping in the future the native-image friction can be lowered, but as of now it's not trivial like other languages.

If I remember correctly you have to redistribute some .dll (VC something) file alongside your .exe on Windows since fresh Windows installations don't have the .dll. Did that change?

What's the size of hello_world.exe?

Not that slim.

    $ \cat hellogo.go
    package main
    
    import "fmt"
    
    func main() {
      fmt.Println("hello")
    }
    $ go build hellogo.go
    $ \cat hellonim.nim
    echo "hello"
    $ nim c hellonim.nim
    ...
    $ ll
    total 2.2M
    -rwxr-xr-x 1 kbd staff 2.1M Apr 11 20:55 hellogo*
    -rw-r--r-- 1 kbd staff   66 Apr 11 20:42 hellogo.go
    -rwxr-xr-x 1 kbd staff  87K Apr 11 20:55 hellonim*
    -rw-r--r-- 1 kbd staff   13 Apr 11 20:29 hellonim.nim

Last I looked (a couple of months ago) the executable produced linked dynamically but there was a flag to link statically.