You just described http://www.lisette.run

Cgo is cheap these days, don't worry about it.

It's barely more expensive than a direct function call but, not so you'd notice unless it's in a hot loop. At which point the lack of cross-language inlining is your real problem.

Various GCs can go faster now too. JEP 376 talks about hundreds-of-microsecond work done in pause now that GC no longer has to scan the whole stack.

That said: 1ms? 1ms is getting into the sorts of latency the OS and hardware impose on your program no matter what it does. For example, on x86, a SMI can take 300us, or 1000us if you're unlucky. I've seen softirqs for shitty wifi chips take a hundred milliseconds! And God help you if you take a hard page fault:

You're worried about 1ms latencies, right? So you're mlock()ing all memory? Running RT threads pinned to cores? Carefully using PI and static priorities to avoid inversions? Avoiding blocking IO everywhere, not even for graphics page-flipping? Managing thermal headroom to avoid involuntary clock collapses? And it should go without saying, but I have to ask: you're running a PREEMPT_RT kernel, right?

No? You're not doing any of these things? Then why are you worried about 1ms in GC?

Game GCs are interesting because you know that the execution is structured like this and you know how much time you have left before you have to switch back to application code for the next frame/time step. There's interesting optimizations you can make around this and could almost completely avoid user-observable GC pauses.

Exactly. This is why Minecraft Java edition was such a disastrous flop.

What are you describing as a frame update? I am trying to be as generous as possible to your comment and thereby assuming there is a disconnect between my understanding of ‘frame update’ and yours. Genuinely curious, because that term as I am familiar with it means the entire time allotted to generating and rendering a single frame for display. If that’s what you meant, you are asserting that a ‘modern game’ is typically running at 333 fps. I am typically using the term ‘modern game’ to describe newly releasing AAA games nearly all of which struggle on many hardware configurations to achieve a steady 60 fps (which is 16 ms per frame).