If you want something with a small footprint I would personally go for Rust, but anything that compiles to a static binary is going to be better than something that needs a dedicated runtime.

Python is what I use for small one-time scripts and utility stuff that doesn’t need to run long, but it may be worse than Java…

I also pay for Kagi and I’m super happy with that decision. I do wish they’d stop putting so much AI cruft into their search engine, but at least I can disable it.