I'm not convinced to be honest. Even with tiny heaps like 32MB JVM processes with practically nothing but a hello world micronaut project consume up to 200MB of RAM. There is more to this than just the dumb GC which always predictably hits the configured maximum or if there is no maximum it will just gobble up your most of your system. I once saw an instance of tomcat allocate 30GB to itself on a staging system with at most one user at a time simply because the machine had 128GB RAM. 30GB for nothing. I personally dislike the JVM. However I have no problem with Java or any JVM derived languages but it simply doesn't matter how much you hyper optimize your code if the underlying VM is junk.

The way RAM is managed in Java and in C is very different; neither is better than the other, but it's different, and you don't seem to understand the Java model. In that model, you give an application a maximum heap, which the program will use regardless of the minimum it needs to improve its performance. You want it to use less RAM? Just tell it to. Having said that, very recently Java has started to return RAM to the OS if it's just sitting idle. See https://malloc.se/blog/zgc-softmaxheapsize