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This is not our experience at all. Our experience is that typical Java programs will consume a lot more memory, and spend a lot more time doing GC and other un

This is not our experience at all. Our experience is that typical Java programs will consume a lot more memory, and spend a lot more time doing GC and other unproductive work than typical Go programs. Go provides a lot more tools that give more bang for the buck when optimizing. For example, everything in Java is a reference to some other distant blob of memory. This does not work well on todays cpus compared to being able to colocate things. We run more stuff on the same machines than we could with Java. Team wise, Go is easier to learn, and scales better with teams. We don't have trouble with team members struggling with certain team member's code / abstractions like we did with Java or C++. Switching between the two, there is a lot more cognitive overhead in Java land. It's understandable that this may be boring to some, but it is a great feature of the language.

kaba0 5y ago
> and spend a lot more time doing GC and other unproductive work than typical Go programs That’s definitely way in the other direction - Java’s GCs run circles around Go’s. (Part of) the reason for Java’s bigger memory consumption is that it is very lazy when it comes to GC. Go runs it all the time for lower latency (at the price of much lower throughput) while Java allows for control it.
- geodel 5y ago
  Java GC has to be very good considering Java could take 10 times more memory for typical data structures compared to memory efficient layouts.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    Not sure if sarcastic, but that has nothing to do with the quality of a GC algorithm. Sure, Java does not (yet) have value types so data structures with non-primitive elements will not have the most optimal layout, but java does objectively have the state of the art GC implementations that work under so high allocation rates that other GCs simply break down. Eg. Go notably slows down threads to let the GC catch up with the work load.

kaba0 5y ago

> and spend a lot more time doing GC and other unproductive work than typical Go programs That’s definitely way in the other direction - Java’s GCs run circles around Go’s. (Part of) the reason for Java’s bigger memory consumption is that it is very lazy when it comes to GC. Go runs it all the time for lower latency (at the price of much lower throughput) while Java allows for control it.

geodel 5y ago
Java GC has to be very good considering Java could take 10 times more memory for typical data structures compared to memory efficient layouts.
- kaba0 5y ago
  Not sure if sarcastic, but that has nothing to do with the quality of a GC algorithm. Sure, Java does not (yet) have value types so data structures with non-primitive elements will not have the most optimal layout, but java does objectively have the state of the art GC implementations that work under so high allocation rates that other GCs simply break down. Eg. Go notably slows down threads to let the GC catch up with the work load.