[NerdsCentral]

Totally agree. My original aim was to use an idea I had about the way the garbage collector synchronises in the Oracle JVM to give 'windows' of determinism. So I set about making a program to push the gc really hard so I could see if my idea worked. But I have not gotten as far as the original aim yet because I found this interesting stuff about the G1 collector.

As for your points about realtime - I am completely with you. I had in my mind that one might have a realtime system on the rtjvm or in c++ which needed to periodically communicate with a standard JVM. There are three approaches I could see for this. One, would be to send messages and decouple that way. Another is to make the communication abort if it looked like it might cause a deadline miss. The third was to briefly (milliseconds) disable the gc in the standard JVM so the communication could occur and then turn it back on again immediately afterwards.

Now - that sounds like a really bad idea and it probably is - but it is an interesting idea to play with.

So - please don't thing I am proposing realtime programming on the standard JVM, just some ideas for larger systems integration.

[wglb]

So my prime hobby is ham radio, and my prime mode is morse code. These days, we mostly connect computers to the radio to do logging and morse code keying (done through the LPT port). One popular program runs under windows. The big boys use another program that runs under DOS, and lately FreeDOS as a replacement. Running under windows, there is an annoying hesitation once every word or so that is due to whatever is going on in windows.

The solution, provided by the maker of the above-mentioned windows software is an external keying module. With this arrangement, windows sends characters to the hardware brick, which, latency-free, sends out the characters quite nicely. (Amazing how the trained morse-code ear can distinguish ms delays in character starts.)

Personally, I now think that way where a system has a component that is latency rich connected to a component that is latency-free. This of course has implications to the overall solution.