Startup time doesn't matter for long-running applications. It makes sense for things like lambda or knative ("serverless"). Also command-line applications (inc

Startup time doesn't matter for long-running applications. It makes sense for things like lambda or knative ("serverless"). Also command-line applications (including tools you might put in CI). Also, while the JVM starts quickly you also need to do class loading, which can take a while for complex applications with lots of classes. This is also pretty important when running a JVM-hosted language like Clojure which has quite a few classes of its own.