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by pjmlp 12 days ago
Real time GC as used by the military in weapons control systems, and on factory automation robots, keeping PTC and Aicas in business, people pay to use them.
1 comments

TBH, physics limits how latency-sensitive weapons systems need to be and you can largely just disable the GC in these contexts. They use CPUs from the 1990s to do hypersonic terminal guidance. You don’t have to do any performance engineering for many latency-sensitive weapon systems. Could probably write it in Javascript.

For throughput-optimized systems, some of which are real-time, you never see a GC. That loss in performance is simply too large such that the computation becomes intractable. A lot of really poor systems admittedly exist but no one considers them “good”.

Throughput-optimized systems like HFT?

https://www.lmax.com/exchange/technology

No, you could not guide battleship weapons in Javascriptt

https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/aegis-combat-s...

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2402709.2402699

And no they don't disable the GC, they have real time GC implementations,

https://www.ptc.com/en/products/developer-tools/perc

I think you may be confused about what "throughput-optimized" means. HFT is not throughput-optimized by definition. The LMAX link literally says it is a latency-optimized system. An optimal throughput-optimized system has unbounded worst-case latency -- the opposite of "latency-optimized".

None of those links contradict anything I wrote, I am already familiar with all of them.