[tzone]

People use Go vs Java not because of the language differences but because of massive improvement that GO runtime is compared to JVM.

It is crazy that people still don't understand why JVM sucks, and why GO's approach to minimize GC pause latency is far superior design decision compared to whatever JVM has been trying to do with its GC iterations for god knows how many years with gazzillion different variants that all suck in different ways.

[vips7L]

Pretty outdated take. Java’s GCs are a generation ahead of Go’s.

[bheadmaster]

Yeah, they have to be in order to make up for the braindead decision of making every variable a pointer to heap allocated memory.

Go wins not by technical ingenuity, but by simply not making fundamentally bad decisions in the first place.

[Pooge]

I'm the biggest fanboy of Go, but since Java 25 the default garbage collector (ZGC) is very similar to Go's.

[tzone]

Garbage collector alone can't do what happens in Go language+runtime. Simplest example is that there is no way to allocate fixed arrays with non-pointer structs in Java. That is just not possible in the language.

Design of Go allows programmer to rewrite their program to make it as GC efficient as needed. You can even have essentially zero GC overhead and do stuff manually for really high performance needs. And you can also write regular code when GC isn't a big deal.

Those options simply don't exist in Java language. Your only bet in Java would be to embed some C code which is a nightmare of its own.

There is a reason why almost all backened systems that run on JVM are a huge pain in the ass even at moderate scale. They all end up rewriting parts in other languages and at the end just rewriting the whole thing.

[hashmash]

Low pause collectors like ZGC and Shenandoah must be enabled explicitly. G1 is still the default.

It should also be noted that the low pause Azul C4 collector was available in 2010, but it was a commercial product.

[Pooge]

You're right; apologies! I set the JVM flag quite some time ago, haha.

[age123456gpg]

Very similar, in the same way non-compacting and non-generational collector is similar to compacting generational :shrug: