Eating RAM for breakfast is a symptom of two factors: 1. Garbage collection. It works better the more RAM it has to play with. And in return it provides pretty

Eating RAM for breakfast is a symptom of two factors: 1. Garbage collection. It works better the more RAM it has to play with. And in return it provides pretty substantial benefits (eliminates many memory-related errors and nonproductive housekeeping tasks). 2. RAM being available in humongous amounts for very little money. Eating RAM for breakfast simply isn't a buisness-significant downside of a language/vm these days. BTW, the Oracle JVM (and probably others as well) garbage collector can be tuned quite a bit to make it less memory-hungry at the expense of performance. Factor 2 makes this a rarely-necessary and thus little known option.