You say this stuff is incredibly hard. Kaba says it's impossible and don't try. I say it's easy. I whipped up a JIT to make my virtual machine go 50x faster. I never expected Blinkenlights to go faster than Bochs. Now all the sudden it's outperforming Qemu for many of my use cases. People are doing stuff with it I never expected, like booting the Linux Kernel and running Alpine Linux on Cygwin. Garbage Collection is easy too. I wrote a GC using the NSA POPCNT instruction for an experimental LISP dialect I wrote last Winter called Plinko. It ran faster than any other LISP interpreter I've seen, as measured by the GC-intensive binary trees benchmark game. The only thing faster was SBCL with JIT which was only a hair faster than Plinko using just an interpreter. NIH is awesome because the truth is, when you're focused on your own needs, outperforming the big official things is like shooting fish in a barrel. Technologies like the JVM aren't great because they're better. They're great because they've carefully crafted the long tail of edge cases and compromises that enables it to be good enough for the largest group of people. Generalized software is at a huge disadvantage because bloat fills caches and it can't use special case algorithms. For example, people publish papers all the time bragging about how they beat the performance of the C++ STL at some given thing and that impresses the people who never tried, but it honestly isn't that hard if you consider the burdens that the STL is required to carry.
