I keep seeing plenty of evidence that the JVM is indeed heavy. When I was working at a startup and we were running Solr on the JVM, it kept running out of memory and crashing. When I tried using Clojure I was irritated by the startup time of the REPL on the JVM. More evidence: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13692206/high-java-memory....

If you want something light like Clojure and don't need any Java libs, try Pixie. https://github.com/pixie-lang/pixie

If you want something light not like Clojure, Go is a great choice. It's fast to compile, fast to run and doesn't gobble up your memory unless you force it to.