I don't think you know what JVMs do if you think they're overengineered. Go's "simplicity", while great for small apps, means we don't get anywhere near the same level of monitoring we get with Java, slower performance (though not a dramatic difference), and much less flexibility (no polyglotism, no hot code swapping, no dependency-conflict resolution) -- not that you should notice the JVM's "overengineering" if you don't need it. Besides, everything is overengineered until you need exactly what it's engineered to do. A helicopter may seem "overengineered" if all you need is a car, but if you need a helicopter, then a car may be seriously lacking. In the case of JVM vs Go, if you need large data sets in memory, interesting concurrent data structures (even concurrent hash maps), or even if you need to know exactly what your server is doing -- the JVM doesn't seem so overengineered any more. As to new projects being written in Java vs other platforms (Go included), you have no idea what you're talking about. All of Android doesn't even amount to 5% of Java developers.