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Notes -
Quants care about latency, yes, but they're more than happy to throw a bit more hardware at their problems.
I can see I'll have to be more specific about what I take "performance" to mean. Performance is... efficiency. How much time, how many CPU clock cycles, how much memory, how many watts do you use while performing your task? Latency is one slice of it - a poorly written program will have poor performance on multiple dimensions, including latency - but low-latency alone is not the whole picture. A data center would likely not be happy to know you've reduced their latency at the cost of a large increase in power draw - power and cooling are a major factor in their operations! For game consoles, the hardware is fixed. If you take more compute than the console has to give you to get the next frame ready, your performance is poor. On any platform, if you use more memory than is available, everything suffers as you swap out to disk.
If your overriding concern is latency, to the exclusion of other performance concerns, I guess I can soften to say that GC may be workable.
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