Well, on one of the Dart threads, bashing its hello world size, this[1] came up:

Compile "Hello world" into an executable, and see how many kilobytes it takes on most architectures, despite the object file being a few bytes.

This thread pretty much responds to that. It is no 17000 lines, nor 17000K, it is just 142 bytes (other comments suggest it is 62).

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3098660

It makes more sense for VM byte-code as the bytes not only have to be loaded (probably by the page, again) but the bytes have to be run and possibly jitted, too.

Practice and understanding for when you've got to work on something that comes with 4k of RAM in total, if you're lucky.

I edited out the words "apart from on an embedded device with a tiny memory" as I had hoped that the mention of the modern computer and virtual memory would suffice.

But this was a genuine question rather than a put-down. I was hoping to have my assumption debunked.

EDIT: I have no idea why you're being down-voted seems unfair