Z Garbage Collector: The Next Generation

As a Clojure programmer, I'm so happy that I'm getting all these improvements over many years. It's fashionable to complain about Java — but I don't use Java, and yet I benefit from all the fantastic work that is being done on the JVM.

The improvement in throughput is tantalising. I'd love to see a comparison to the G1GC throughput. I wonder if it's getting close enough that ZGC might some day become a candidate to replace G1 as the default collector?

Note that the Z Garbage Collector was released in JVM 11 so it’s about 5 years old now.

This title is a perfect adversarial example for text classification. Contains both "Z" and "generation" in it but has nothing to do with Gen Z.

Love ZGC's autotuning, I'm hoping for the day where we don't need -Xmx as well!

Is the next generation of GCs going to use Reinforcement Learning and Machine Learning? The problem with a lot GC is that there's a currently unavoidable tradeoff between memory usage, latency and throughput.

Crazy to me that garbage collection systems are a subject of continual evolution and discussion. You'd think it would be "solved" by now... Or is that just in Java world?