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Java's garbage collection is far from the state of the art in GC technology. While there are some non-standard JVMs that have advanced GC (such as IBM's real-time garbage collector), the standard JVM does not.

Current-generation garbage collectors have far better performance, and many research GCs support concurrent, pause-free collection.

(And that leaves aside the non-performance benefits of a GC, in terms of engineering simplicity and bug elimination.)

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Any pointers on the state of the art?

http://www.azulsystems.com/technology/c4-garbage-collector

Which I would add is a production garbage collector, an updated version of the Pauseless one that's got its own paper and is covered in the 2nd edition of the book on garbage collection, http://www.amazon.com/The-Garbage-Collection-Handbook-Manage...

Does require custom hardware or kernel cooperation for speed (e.g. it needs to do batched MMU operations without clearing the TBL on each 2MB page). Looks like it's got a better read barrier than the Pauseless one; that does of course cost extra on stock hardware.

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