[mcguire]

Let's break it down. Hopefully someone can fill in the parts I don't know.

> The OCaml garbage collector is a modern hybrid generational/incremental collector which outperforms hand-allocation in most cases.

Ocaml is mostly functional and likes to allocate many short lived objects. With enough memory, a moving collector is very good at handling that load.

> Unlike the Java GC, which gives GCs a bad name, the OCaml GC doesn't allocate huge amounts of memory at start-up, nor does it appear to have arbitrary fixed limits that need to be overridden by hand.

Java's GC (-s; there's a bunch) use a heap with a fixed maximum size and an initial allocation. It has also received much more research attention over the decades. It also has a lot of knobs to fiddle with.

I've run production Java web app servers with multi-gig heaps where almost all requests were handled in the young generation. The knobs and visibility were very nice.

Ocaml doesn't use a fixed size heap, so it can conceivably take over all of memory. It also doesn't have all of the knobs. But it works pretty well.