alt Hacker NewsIt is my tone, GenX, no minced words.
The infrastructure required to support a programming language, startup and shutdown boilerplate, all the required functionality to support standard library features including integration points between language semantics and support code.
Stuff like what code runs before and after main(), trap handlers for floating point arithmetic, handling of thread local storage, bind language heap handling primitives to library code, traps for handling stack overflow errors,....
Right, runtime is so broad that it's hard to say something has "no runtime". libgcc + your choice of crt0 is a C runtime, and the JVM is a Java runtime. That's a huge spectrum.
It's worth being charitable in your interpretation though and recognising "no runtime" probably refers to JVM-shaped or Node-shaped things, not libgcc+crt0-shaped things.