[exabrial]

I think this statement is a reach. There are plenty of concurrent collectors for the JVM, and there are tons of architectural and coding strategies to mitigate inconvenient GCs. This is not a one-of-a-kind problem, this is well studied and the path is well trodden. Azul is a convenient solution that wouldn't involve having to do a whole lot of case study, but it's certainly not the only one. And this is as-if perfect deterministic latency was the only factor that was important (then why not use C?).

What it sounds like instead was very minimal benchmarks or science was performed ahead of time, then a lot of justification written afterward. I know that's a reach as well, but this is a well-trodden path, so the answer "Pony is the best possible solution for the interest of our business" just seems like a very strange conclusion.