[haxen]

Keep in mind that it's not fundamental. Generational GCs just make a bet that you can save a lot of effort by segregating the objects by age. In almost all Java workloads there's plenty of short-lived objects, and a generational GC takes care of them at an especially low cost. The price to pay for that is pretty low, basically it's the overhead of card marking (a write barrier is needed) and subsequent partial scanning of the Old Generation if there are many references from old to new objects.

Only very specialized workloads won't create much short-lived objects, and for those cases there are alternative non-generational GCs on the JVM (Z, Shenandoah).