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by pizlonator 443 days ago
> There isn’t a single truly pause-less GC for Java — and I’ve already proven that to you before. If such a GC exists for any other language, name it.

You haven't proven that. If you define "pause" as "the world stops", then no, state of the art concurrent GCs for Java don't have that. If you define "pause" as "some thread might sometimes take a slow path due to memory management" then SGCL has those, as do most memory management implementations (including and especially malloc/free).

> And no, SGCL doesn’t introduce slow paths, because mutators never have to synchronize with the GC. Pointer access is completely normal — unlike in other languages that rely on mechanisms like read barriers.

The best concurrent GCs have no read barriers, only extremely cheap write barriers.

You have allocation slow paths, at the very least.
1 comments
pebal 443 days ago
First, there are no Java GCs that completely eliminate stop-the-world pauses. ZGC and Shenandoah reduce them to very short, sub-millisecond windows — but they still exist. Even the most concurrent collectors require STW phases for things like root scanning, final marking, or safepoint synchronization. This is documented in OpenJDK sources, benchmarks, and even in Oracle’s own whitepapers. Claiming Java has truly pause-less GC is simply false.

Second, you’re suggesting there are moving GCs that don’t use read barriers and don’t stop mutator threads at all. That’s technically implausible. Moving collectors by definition relocate objects, and unless you stop the world or have some read barrier/hazard indirection, you can’t guarantee pointer correctness during concurrent access. You must synchronize with the mutator somehow — either via stop-the-world, read barriers, or epoch/hazard-based coordination. It’s not magic, it’s basic memory consistency.

SGCL works without moving anything. That’s why it doesn’t need synchronization, read barriers, or even slow-path allocation stalls. That’s not a limitation — that’s a design goal. You can dislike the model, but let’s keep the facts straight.

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