[saltysugar]

You don't even bother to read past the section about the limitations that the engineers were well aware of in advance - they re-emphasize a common concern for people who question their choice of JVM.

The next line reads: "As a result of these factors using the filesystem and relying on pagecache is superior to maintaining an in-memory cache or other structure—we at least double the available cache..."

And if you don't know about pagecache, it's an in-memory cache managed by the OS and has nothing to do with JVM's memory at all.

And you forgot that C++ isn't the easiest language when it comes to designing a distributed system. Scala, as I mentioned, offers many other features that suit the needs of the team. Of course if you're a good engineer you'll know that there are trade-offs such as compiling time, but that's the same for every engineering decision.

[shmerl]

They were aware and had to design around them. See my point above.

[andrewflnr]

Designing around platform flaws can be worth it if there are commensurate benefits. You're very lucky if you've never had to do this, or perhaps just blind to the tradeoffs you were making.

[nl]

That's like saying "we had to consider memory management" in a C++ system.

When you are designing a high performance system you have to consider everything. Different platforms have different tradeoffs, but the tradeoffs on the JVM have been well proven over time.