Except that almost all these comments seem to assume a long-running / web process. Start-up times and memory requirements for the JVM are just horrendous; I c

Except that almost all these comments seem to assume a long-running / web process. Start-up times and memory requirements for the JVM are just horrendous; I can't write a serious command-line tool in Java because of these constraints. Even Scala has a compiler-tool which runs as a background task (fsc) because of this.