[mschaef]

> But my understanding from having interviewed people that worked there is that it's so convoluted to avoid GC pauses that you might as well be using C++.

I've done a very minimal amount of this... the gist is that you avoid GC pauses by avoiding allocation. This translates into reusing objects using pools, etc.... and the assorted complexities that come from having to explicitly manage object lifecycles. In critical applications you often want to avoid dynamic memory in C/C++, so it may not be all that different.