[pkolaczk]

Sure and this DFS in C++ memory use is probably huge compared to many hand-crafted assembly or C programs from 1980s. But who cares? 100 MB or even 1GB is really tiny for today's server hardware. And Java runtime itself is a few MB really. What takes most memory in many Java programs (e.g. IDEs) is code and libraries.

[otterley]

Size can lead to a tremendous difference in performance on modern CPUs, particularly if you can take advantage of L2/L3 instruction and data caches. It still matters, even on modern "big memory" systems where gigabytes of installed RAM are the norm.

[pkolaczk]

Technically correct, but filesystems are mostly about I/O. For example this Baidu filesystem copies blocks of data into userland memory and transfers them in RPC messages - any system using proper zero copy approach would easily beat it even if coded in Python or JS. Baidu also seems to use threads, locks and SEDA instead of more efficient (but much harder to code) thread-per-core async architecture. Threadpools and lock based synchronization are terrible for latency.

The fact that something is in C++ doesn't make it automatically efficient. And particularly, if we're talking about milliseconds, not nanoseconds here, in Java or C# you can do just everything what you can do in C++, performance-wise.