I'm writing go in my dayjob right now, and my reaction was "hey under a megabyte for a runtime with GC is pretty good!"
So I checked just now, and my hello world for go was 1.9M. And you're well within your rights to just declare "the fact that go is even worse doesn't make Janet good" but let's be honest - plenty of people have accepted go's compromises, so something coming in at better than half the size is relatively much better.
edit: out of curiosity i used gcc to make hello worlds in C and C++, which came in at 32k and 37k respectively.
But those executables have run-times in shared libraries.
It sounds as if Janet's run-time is statically linked; it could also be built as a .so?
Shared library calls (and variable references) are ugly, though. Unless you have a large number of Janet programs, the space saving isn't worth the shared library tax.
So I checked just now, and my hello world for go was 1.9M. And you're well within your rights to just declare "the fact that go is even worse doesn't make Janet good" but let's be honest - plenty of people have accepted go's compromises, so something coming in at better than half the size is relatively much better.
edit: out of curiosity i used gcc to make hello worlds in C and C++, which came in at 32k and 37k respectively.