I feel like when you hobby you run stuff on your local machine. Are you saying that your local machine doesn't have atleast 1GB of memory? Saying that it can't run hobby projects is a bit of a stretch.
I feel like the JVM has already proven its self to be viable as a production VM. The 'helloworld' argument doesn't really hold water because you would never run helloworld in a vm. If you care about fast setup/teardowns or small memory footprints then don't use ANY vm. If you want things like easier security policies, garbage collection and maybe more the point: scalability then the VM is a great platform to develop for.