[sushsjsuauahab]

"Java is far from minimal"

My web servers run with like 300MB of RAM and work fine on t2.nano serving thousands of users??

And also Java gives you full access to primitive types if you don't like OOP

[simonblack]

I think he means that Java is not a small language, rather than it doesn't take up much space in RAM.

Personally, I still think that C is a very good compromise between size (both of the language and of its RAM usage) and it's level of abstraction.

The size of a language can be judged by the size of a definitive text on learning the language. Compare how small the K&R book "The C Programming Language" is [230 pages] compared with (say) the O'Reilly book "Learning Python" [1200 pages].

[sushsjsuauahab]

I respect this argument but I'm curious as to how the smallness of a language would be beneficial to a developer, if the goal is to be able to rapidly build applications which are still quite performant.

C, when run on the same exact machine as Java, is only a few x faster in the best case scenario to my understanding. And as complexity of the application grows, there is a chance that you don't manage your memory properly, something which a garbage collected language usually does well enough.

Couple in the rich libraries for both languages, I think I would still choose java unless I was writing an embedded system.

[tomjen3]

With a WM, and a rather complex language.

And of course if you had written that in C it would probably have taken up a lot less.