Garbage collection can cost money to a firm.
Working a few years ago in a large investment firm, lots of the code used to trade via algos, make markets, index arb, was all written in C++. Deterministic, performant, reliable - it just worked as planned and expected.<p>New tech lead comes in, swaggers about, declares all the street now uses Java for their trading code, we should too. I got the desk heads to listen and be wise to the impending issues, and they told him fine - but if the new Java based code had direct impact on PnL, then his budget, ultimately, he would pay for it. Cocksure, he agreed.<p>Despite throwing bucket loads of Java devs at it, spending fortunes on &quot;tuning&quot; consultants, performance suffered, GC did affect at critical trading conditions, and eventually he was exposed and kicked out.<p>The C++ code came back out of retirement, was updated for C++11&#x2F;14, and still serves them well to this day.