Upstart $3bn forex trader dumps Oracle JVM for Azul's Zing

Re: It's Syndrome, and he's using his Zero-Point Energy Beam to Trade!

Sure .Net does GC, but it does it in a far less impacting way - completely in the background, and non blocking - unlike in Java

What a load of fatuous, handwaving bullshit (though we expect no less from a known troll).

The last time I checked,[1] the CLR offered exactly two GCs, "workstation" and "server", which were both respectable generational collectors, tuned for different workload classes, but nothing remarkable.

As of .Net 4, neither GC does concurrent collection by default, and only the workstation GC supports it at all. And both GCs block processing threads (when they try to allocate from the heap) during collection when they run in non-current mode. And the server GC schedules multiple high-priority GC threads per core, so even its background mode can block processing threads simply through preemption.

What you really mean is that Sun Java sucks, and you have to spend lot of money if you want a version that actually works well

Clearly what you really mean is that you have no idea how GC works. Different collectors are optimized for different workloads. There are relatively few classes of workload where you want consistent GC overhead; usually bursty GC overhead is better, either because the typical applications you're running never need to do significant GC, or because they're interactive and have significant "think time" where the JVM is otherwise idle anyway. There's no single optimal real GC behavior - that's why .Net offers two collectors, and those with multiple modes.

Azul's C4 is well-suited to workloads like trading where you want consistent behavior across a huge number of short-lived transactions, but it's not particularly good for, say, retail banking or insurance applications (another big area for Java), or for running Eclipse, or for UIMA-based text processing, etc. And, as others have pointed out, it's not the first consistent-GC JVM either. Horses for courses.

[1] I can't get to the blog post you cited at the moment - though I'm pretty sure I've read it before anyway - but there are any number of other MSDN pieces on CLR GC, such as this one.