Java has quite possibly the best production GC of all the VMs out there.

And yet operating distributed systems built on it is a world of pain. Elasticsearch, I am looking at you. Modern hardware resources leave the limitations of running/scaling on top JVM to be an expensive, frustrating endeavor.

In addition to elasticsearch's metrics, there's like 4 JVM metrics I have to watch constantly on all my clusters to make sure the JVM and its GC is happy.

For me, it solves a very specific problem.

In-house app that uses jdbc, is easy to develop and needs to be cross-platform (windows, linux, aix, as400). The speed picks up as it runs, usually handling 3000-5000 eps over UDP on decade old hardware.