I agree. To better understand garbage collection, nothing better than implementation. This article is such a joy to read:
https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2013/12/08/babys-first-ga...
There is nothing to understand or not understand there, it's hard data.
If you think GC pauses are measured in milliseconds, and not microseconds, then you're reading horribly outdated material. You're off by three orders of magnitude for an off-the-shelf GC with no tuning.
Even if you go for a GC that is designed to balance throughput and latency, like G1, you can still configure what pause times it should target and those can easily be ~10-20msec if you want, with the vast majority of pauses being far less than that (less than 3 msec).
"I was recently reading some blog posts of the V8 JS engine team. There is nothing to understand or not understand there"
Look, if your knowledge of GC comes from reading V8 blog posts then you're proving the grandparent's point pretty nicely. You leaped from an extremely basic and remote understanding of GC to "there's nothing to understand or not understand here".
Also yes, pauseless GC tends to have higher overheads than GC that pauses for longer. Whether that matters or not depends a lot on the use cases and actual size of the overheads. For example ZGC is pauseless but not yet generational. Generational ZGC when it launches will improve throughput significantly.
Google haven't done pauseless GC for V8. I don't know why not because they have done one for Android. ART uses a fully concurrent collector iirc. At any rate, although you can't import a JVM GC to V8, you can run JavaScript on the JVM using GraalJS and use the GCs that way. Though I don't recall off hand if Graal supports ZGC yet. There's no deep reason why it couldn't.
https://source.android.com/devices/tech/dalvik/gc-debug#art_...
It also does mixed AOT / JITC, amongst other tricks.
Having studied GC, implemented GC, and used it extensively (either as a dev or someone in operations) I'd say that there's just a lot of people out there who don't understand it. That's why people come to the wrong conclusion that it's somehow "inelegant" or "brute-force", when it is definitely neither of those.
There's also a lot of people who formed their opinions on GC from, say, what the JVM was like in the 1990s.
And there's a lot of people who only have a vague idea of how GC works in theory, but no knowledge of deeper theory and no practical knowledge of how real-world GC algorithms work.