I consider 10ms pauses to fall into the "set the minimum time very high" branch of my statement. That is, if you can handle pauses of that magnitude there are already lots of GC options for you and golang is not adding much (that said 10 ms pause guarantees are much better than the current so more power to them).
Even 1ms pause ceilings drive people to non-GC options, so I think the "game changer" number is much lower than that.
Think of a computer game. 60 FPS. So 16 ms time per frame. Assume you're running comfortably within 14 ms per frame, so you get nice and smooth 60 FPS. A 10 ms GC here means you'll definitely miss at least 1 frame, a good chance you'll miss more, because the simulation code (or something else that needs to run whether or not a frame was on time) will need to catch up.
For interactive desktop applications, the pause should be adjustable or at most a few milliseconds. Say, maximum 5 ms.
For hardware devices... well, you just don't use GC there in the first place. Microsecond is a pretty long time in that area.
Even 1ms pause ceilings drive people to non-GC options, so I think the "game changer" number is much lower than that.
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