Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

Java syntax isn't perfect, but it is consistent, and predictable. And hey, if you're using an Idea or Eclipse (and not notepad, atom, etc), it's just pressing control-space all day and you're fine.

Java memory management seems weird from a Unix Philosophy POV, till you understand whats happening. Again, not perfect, but a good tradeoff.

What do you get for all of these tradeoffs? Speed, memory safety. But with that you still still have dynamic invocation capabilities (making things like interception possible) and hotswap/live redefinition (things that C/CPP cannot do).

Perfect? No, but very practical for the real world use case.

The GC story is just great, however. Pretty much the best you can get in the entire ecosystem of managed-memory languages.

You have different GC algorithms implemented, and you can pick and tune the one that best fits your use-case.

The elephant in the room is of course ZGC, which has been delivering great improvements in lowering the Stop-the-world GC pauses. I've seen it consistently deliver sub-millisecond pauses whereas other algorithms would usually do 40-60 msec.

Needless to say, you can also write GC-free code, if you need that. It's not really advertised, but it's feasible.

There's no value types (outside primitives) and everything is about pointer chasing. And surely if there was less pointer chasing it'd be easier to do the GC work at the same time.