Sigh, don't take your use case of GCs and apply it as a rule to others.

I work in telecoms on the layer just above the FPGAs/DSP: even a 1ms 'pause' would be totally unacceptable here..

I think you are way overthinking my comment. I just added a note that for regular, user-space applications there really is no longer a reason to use low-level languages even if latency is important.

Of course embedded will always exist, as well as specialized programs requiring utmost control over the machine.

I don't see any such note and it's 8 days later. May be you should check your comment again? Also, while games aren't exactly regular applications performance-wise, I think they fall more under that than embedded or utmost control and while a 1ms delay won't be the end of the world, it'll likely hurt.