On: The JVM is not that heavy

[david-given]

Ah, it was JamVM.

http://jamvm.sourceforge.net/

Alas, the last release looks like it was 2014, although it does claim to support Java 8. The actual interpreter core is under 100kB (class libraries extra, of course).

It plugs into the OpenJDK! Look for the openjdk-8-jre-jamvm package in Debian.