Ok, so lets go with your use case. You can run basic java ("hello world") under 3MB with a startup time of about 0.1 second. So that is the true overhead if you really care about tight code. The default values are pretty large. Everything else (memory/startup) is added due to external libraries that are needed and additional memory as the program grows.

Given that "kkowalczyk" talked about 10K line programs, what applications are you thinking of that are 10K lines and cannot tolerate a 0.1 second/3 MB overhead. Would you restart java everytime? Note that even a simple helloworld c program has about 0.01second/0.5MB overhead.

> Java needs a quite heavyweight runtime to be installed, that imposes quite a bit of startup overhead.

One can always use one of the commercial native compilers for Java, any of them can easily produce static binaries with fast startup times.

Don't measure Java the language, by Oracle JVM the implementation.