In 2010, I think arguing that relying on the JVM would be an acceptable gripe. However, it is 2023, almost all of your stated issues have been (IMHO quite elegantly) addressed WITH the added benefit (or maybe detriment?) of backwards compatibility in modern versions of Java and the _incredible_ engineering behind the JVM.

I would actually argue the inverse. Between the two languages, Go would be my second choice precisely because it does NOT have the JVM. Even though I have used GraalVM for AOT, with Docker / containerd, I would take the JVM any day. It's just night & day when operating something in production.

That being said, Go still has a lighter resource footprint but I found Go to be a better Python alternative than Java.

Here are some IMHO acceptable gripes with Java:

- Java represents strings using UTF-16 (although there are optimizations introduced in Java9+ already to use LATIN1 / ascii encoding if you don't need to use Unicode)

- Java makes it difficult to have steady state memory consumption (by design)

- Java's escape analysis is primitive

- Java is missing value types (coming soon!)

I think Go is great, but IMHO modern Java is just better at building backend systems.