It's easy to write a GC that doesn't stop the world at all. A Baker treadmill [1], for example, is a very simple type of incremental collector that can be imple

It's easy to write a GC that doesn't stop the world at all. A Baker treadmill [1], for example, is a very simple type of incremental collector that can be implemented quickly. (It's a fun exercise, by the way!) If you implement it "by the book", it will have no stop-the-world pauses whatsoever (assuming the mutator doesn't allocate faster than collection can happen). The problem is that a simple GC like this will have low throughput, so it's not worth it. These are some of the most common misconceptions about GCs: that it's hard to write a low-latency GC and that pauses are all that matter. In reality, GC engineering is all about the tradeoff between throughput and latency. [1]: https://www.memorymanagement.org/glossary/t.html#treadmill https://www.memorymanagement.org/glossary/t.html#treadmill