I’ve heard about HFT people using Java for workloads where micro optimization is needed.
To be frank, I just never understood it. From what I’ve seen heard/you have to write the code in such a way that makes it look clumsy and incompatible with pretty much any third party dependencies out there.
And at that point, why are you even using Java? Surely you could use C, C++, or any variety of popular or unpopular languages that would be more fitting and ergonomic (sorry but as a language Java just feels inferior to C# even). The biggest swelling point of Java is the ecosystem, and you can’t even really use that.
But on Java specifically: every Java object still has a 24-byte overhead. How doesn't that thrash your cache?
The advice on avoiding allocations in Java also results in terrible code. For example, in math libraries, you'll often see void Add(Vector3 a, Vector3 b, Vector3 our) as opposed to the more natural Vector3 Add(Vector3 a, Vector3 b). There you go, function composition goes out the window and the resulting code is garbage to read and write. Not even C is that bad; the compiler will optimize the temporaries away. So you end up with Java that is worse than a low-level imperative language.
And, as far as I know, the best GC for Java still incurs no less than 1ms pauses? I think the stock ones are as bad as 10ms. How anyone does low-latency anything in Java then boggles my mind.