Just look at the hand performance articles on C... People talk about it because you can do it, not because you have to do it.
It's crazy I can't tell Java and NodeJS "use the memory you need". Instead I have to specify max memory sizes (and then watch as they inevitably consume all of it).
Perfect agreement.
Define the 'memory you need'? You know the computer doesn't have a cristal ball to know what latency vs memory usage trade off you want..
Just like every compiled, non-GC program gets. It's annoying af to fiddle with interpreter/VM "maximum heap sizes".
I don't write java, but my impression is the articles being talked about are much more java specific than the C ones are (C specific).
In my limited experience writing performance-critical Python code the improvements always came from choosing better libraries (eg for faster serializations) or improving our own code. The GC never showed up in profiling as an issue for us.
And yet, it performs great, including predictable STW latencies, all with a relatively simple and straightforward algorithm. With that in mind, the Java GC's manifold ways of tuning the GC in all its aspects for minimal performance improvements sound more like something that was purposely built as something people can build their livelihood upon by providing consulting services, rather than something that was built for the best performance possible for everyone.
And they tend to be very memory hungry. Often, the memory overhead is the difference between running a program or having a bunch of browser's tabs open.
Since memory deallocation is not deterministic, there have to be a tradeoff between lazy scheduling (which increase memory consumption) or frequent scheduling (which has a performance overhead).
You can do a fine tuning between those variables but that means that a high performant with a low memory footprint system is a very challenging thing to make using a tracing garbage collection (the ones in Java and Node).
Go has been able to perform well with a simple GC because it doesn't suffer from this problem.
These articles are bullshit. Most settings are either obsolete or forcing the default. The rest is just useless.
I spent months doing performance tuning of applications stacks which were using Java (for app, database or both). Most of the settings are useless and barely change +-1% in performance.
The JVM has had good defaults for a while. The only thing one MUST configure is the -Xmn and -Xmx options to set the maximum amount of memory allocated to the java process (both settings to the same value).
Beyond that, however, there are many uses for ownership beyond controlling memory resources. Closing a TCP connection, releasing a OpenGL texture...there are lots of applications of having life cycles built in to the code rather than the runtime.
EDIT: fixed typo