Soft Realtime Java

Anyone visiting my home could verify that garbage collection is something best left to some other entity than me. One severe problem with having a computer program looking what your program is doing trying to clean up after it, is that it sometimes gets so confused it has to trigger some divine intervention, stop the time, go through much of the allocated memory and reallocate parts not in use anymore.

This seasonally cleaning can take a while. Usually that's ok, but for more and more applications the world can't wait. One of these are when the computer is busy generating cool synth sounds for a dancefloor in real time.

To solve this issue many programs simply don't use Java, but C++ or something else where you have more control over how your memory is allocated and deallocated. This leads to nicely working software, like the Ableton Live, but also rather much work for the programmers behind it. Ok, Javas somewhat crimped primitives and the JVMs limitied abilities to reach new efficient processor instructions wouldn't make much to help it out either, but anyway.

One new player in the game is IBM's Metronome GC, that can guarantee a maximum pause time for Java GC that is about 2 ms. Of course, someone made a sample-player synth written in java with rather competitive latencies.