[gf000]

> That's fair. I recall doing my due diligence here and confirming it is actually using mostly heap memory, but again it's been a while and I could be wrong.

No, I think you are right - I'm not trying to claim that most of that 1.7 GB is used by the core JVM, just that that's another factor (besides simply the different base heuristics on how much space to claim).

The only fair thing would probably be to re-run the benchmark multiple times with different available RAM (via cgroup) and see the graph. Though I'm fairly confident that Java would beat Go in this particular benchmark at any heap size.