not sure about other managed runtimes but in Go you can disable the automated GC scheduling and schedule it yourself. The GC runs in sub-millisecond time. https://blog.golang.org/ismmkeynote

the point isn't "Go is good enough", because I don't know if it is because the requirements are not stated particularly clearly. If the GC took zero time, duh, it would work and people could use it, it would save them some error cases and make their programming lives easier. If the GC took 3 seconds, it doesn't work. There exists some latency value under which a GC is fast enough that there's no sane argument for -not- using it. What is that value? That's the question at hand.

The question is control; not just total latency, but when exactly it occurs.