_This particular_ 175 LOC Java project takes up an enormous amount of memory. For all you know it was just coded poorly and the Go one is a bit more reasonable.
> the JVM is this super-heavyweight thing that's really just inherently inappropriate for a lot of applications.
The JVM introduces overhead but not so much that you can make these sorts of extrapolations.
1. the JVM itself imposes a high floor (hotspot, many shared libs loaded, ...)
2. the Java language is full of overhead at every level (boxed types are a pet peeve of mine)
3. the Java ecosystem has a tendency to regard memory as an inexhaustible resource, which lead a lot of waste in many 3rd party libraries
Optimization was the original goal, increased maintainability was a pleasant result.
Value types would help so much with this issue. I know they're coming one day. I hope Java/JVM can replicate memory efficiency and cache coherence of C++ std::vector for small objects.
I'm not going to install the JDK just to verify, but feel free to report back if you get different results.
Not sure what the golang overhead is, by comparison.