Observation #1: stop-the-world garbage collection is a thorn in the side of latency-sensitive applications.

Observation #2: we will very soon have more cores than we know what to do with.

Prediction: fully concurrent garbage collection is the future of automatic memory management. I’m talking garbage collectors that run in other threads and clean up after me without ever stopping me in the middle of what I’m doing.

It will almost certainly be more expensive in terms of total CPU time, and probably can’t be as aggressive in terms of what it can reclaim at any point in time, but for most applications the latency guarantees will far outweigh.

Discuss.