[sph]

> Maybe systems that are severely I/O bound but is barely a thing these days.

Any kind of web service is barely a thing today? Which is what 99% of HN posters are working on, hence my comment.

> High-performance throughput-optimized systems are also sensitive at ~1µs granularity for different reasons, so GCs are not used there either

Games are high-performance throughput-optimized systems that have adopted GC languages for 15+ years now, and again a type of application which is much more latency sensitive than most people deal in their day to day.

Nobody is claiming GC is a panacea, but it’s good enough for a lot more use cases people give it credit for.

[jandrewrogers]

If you are severely I/O bound it isn't intrinsic, it means your server is badly under-provisioned in the I/O department. Linux on a modern server can push 200 GB/s of I/O. Even if web services were engineered to a standard that could consume that much I/O, which they are not, you would have to be astonishingly wasteful to burn it all.

It is rare to be severely I/O bound because software engineered for I/O performance tends to run out of memory bandwidth first.

Games are not throughput-optimized systems in any conventional sense. They are a canonical example of latency-optimized systems.

I have nothing against GCs, I use them regularly even in performance-sensitive contexts. But too many people understate the adverse impact of GCs on performance contrary to evidence and theory.

[sph]

I/O bound means waiting on I/O, which isn’t necessarily because it is slow, but because it is simply waiting on data to arrive, like a web service most of its idle time. If your client is dozens of milliseconds away, a GC pause is pretty much invisible, unless you are trying to squeeze every last request/second from a machine (instead of simply scaling horizontally)

That said, from your profile, you seem to work on a very sensitive niche that might colour your opinion, with good reason. What I am claiming is most of us are not building such strict a system.

Even in my toy hobby of OS development a GC isn’t the end of the world unless your goal is to compete with, say, Linux in a some kind of performance challenge, where in that case memory allocation might be the least of your bottlenecks.

[pjmlp]

So you also are fully skilled in using value types, stack allocation and GC region free memory in such languages?