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So could I. I imagine a Java aficionado would say the opposite. Like I said, different ways to think about the problem.

To the posters point about running multiple Java aaps on a single machine, I think ram is the real issue. Java makes in my experience far less frugal use of it. I've seen Java applications eat hundreds of mbs of ram rewritten in Go using 1-2 mb.

Exactly. Go app uses much less RAM than Java app.

Every time I hear this conversation play out, the Java folks point out that the GC is highly tunable/pluggable, so you can shift some levers and get lower memory consumption in exchange for more frequent collections. I'm not a GC expert, so I'm just repeating what I've heard.

This is true. The Java GC (and the whole VM) is one of thr most impressive pieces of software in existence. There are several GCs available, they're tunable, and they support monitoring better than any other I've seen.

No GC I know is happy without a heap several times larger than the program's requirements.

OTOH, Java programs tend to be built using frameworks that soak up memory like crazy. So there's that.

I believe that Go's GC currently bounds heap memory usage to 2x the actual usage (worst case).

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