Ouch! A slap in the face to Sun, written by one of their own.

A study performed by an outside team appears to indicate a rough parity in performance between Java and a common implementation of another OO language called Python (see IEEE Computing, October 2000, "An Empirical Comparison of Seven Programming Languages" by Lutz Prechelt of the University of Karlsruhe). Both platforms are Object Oriented, support web applications, serialization, internet connections and native interfaces. The key difference is that Python is a scripting language. This means there is no compilation to byte code so the Python runtime environment has to do two things in addition to what the Java runtime environment does. It has to perform syntax checks and it must parse the ascii text provided by the programmer. Both of those tasks are performed at compile time by Java and so that capability does not have to be in the JRE.
Given this data, it appears that the JRE can actually be simpler than the Python RE since Java does at least some of this work at compile time. The example above of "Hello World" is a good method for getting an idea of the minimum support code required at runtime. This support code includes garbage collector, byte code interpreter, exception processor and the like. Hello World written in Java2 requires 9M for this most basic support infrastructure. By comparison, this is slightly larger than automountd on Solaris8. The Python runtime required to execute Hello World is roughly 1.6M.

I didn't know it took 9M to run HelloWorld. That's some severe bloat.

I'm going off to teach myself Python now...