Originally I thought the alternative was “8MB but supply your own virtual machine.”
A pure java bytecode (bring-your-own-JVM) Hello World can be under 2KB pretty easily. Smaller than the equivalent C program. But of course, that's not including the size of your system JVM.
That's very misleading. For one, Java running native still needs a Garbage Collector, maintains Object headers which increase memory usage, can do things like reflection for configured classes, can load services via the ServiceLoader, schedule Threads and manage executors, and many other things that are "expected" to any Java application... in summary: native executables still have a Java runtime embedded into them (called Substrate VM, by the way), making them very different from C (much more like Go).
Also,notice that native Java executables still tend to have a lower "peak performance" (i.e. once a "normal" JVM has warmed up, it will almost certainly be faster than a native executable because the latter cannot do JIT compilation to take advantage of runtime profiling, like a normal JVM does).
