Java needs a sophisticated GC particularly because its OO model requires that it allocate an extraordinary amount of small objects, especially as things are boxed and unboxed. Ruby, one of the few true "everything is an object" languages, also suffers from an explosion of tiny objects. Node.js/V8 seems to suffer from this to a lesser extent, although it also ends up being a very memory-hungry language.

Go has been able to perform well with a simple GC because it doesn't suffer from this problem.