[yazzku]

Memory usage too, right? A C++/Rust wasm won't consume a hundredth of the memory a JVM application typically uses. I like getting the job done on a 512MB RAM VPS. JVM the language might be cool; the bloat and forced-GC can be spared.

[jeroenhd]

Java can be fast and memory efficient. The problem I see with many Java programs is that they're built on top of layers upon layers of frameworks. Web server frameworks on top of multithreading frameworks with database ORM frameworks and microservice frameworks all calling in and out of each other. Stack traces that end up accumulating 30 or 40 calls before actual product code even begins.

Tuning the garbage collector often helps, modern Java has excellent GC options that will make most software just run better. That's often not an option when you're stuck with JRE 8 because of the curse of legacy code, but modern JREs have made significant progress in both memory management and general performance optimizations.

Port the same abstractions to any language and you'll get very similar performance issues. I've seen plenty of NodeJS applications crash because they grew out of the 2GiB memory limit I set up, and those node processes weren't doing anything that I deemed worth more than half a gigabyte of RAM either.

The JVM is somewhat aggressive in claiming RAM as memory usage grows, but that often leads to a performance increase in the comparisons I've done. Setting parameters (-xmx / -xms) can often reduce the amount of memory used significantly at the cost of slower application startups.

[icedchai]

JVM ran in relatively little memory back in the day. I remember running applets on ~16 megabyte systems. Compare that to today where you need a half gig of RAM to even launch a browser.

[mhitza]

Right, the internet caffee computers I used to hang out at in the early 2000's had around the 128-256mb of RAM memory, and Java/Flash used to run just fine. Although Java Applets usually seemed to take longer to download, and used to wait a lot of time to start the JVM after that.

[pjmlp]

Just like a JVM for embedded development won't.