To add to this: The same goes for C's process startup (at least the OS won't call main with those arguments; the C stdlib performs some tasks before your code r

To add to this: The same goes for C's process startup (at least the OS won't call main with those arguments; the C stdlib performs some tasks before your code runs), or interpreter startup. Unless you're writing in assembler and call the OS directly, almost every programming language will have some overhead when starting. Granted, managed languages like Java are much worse than many others.