ZGC is effectively pause-free. It uses a STW pause for thread synchronisation of the epoch as an optimisation (we tried synchronising without the pause, but OS scheduling just slowed us down; maybe we'll use new OS techniques for synchronisation in the future). ZGC does zero GC work in these pauses. There is also no strong reason to remove the synchronisation pause because it is no longer than OS jitter (i.e. C programs can experience pauses of similar duration on non-realtime kernels).

BTW, SGCL is a non-moving mark-and-sweep collector and non-moving collectors are no more similar to moving collectors than malloc/free is similar to moving collectors. Garbage collection contains different classes of algorithms with different goals that are so different from one another that it's almost pointless to put them in the same category. Java uses moving collectors because it's the class of algorithms designed to reduce the throughput overhead of all non-moving approaches (from manual malloc/free, through automatic RAII and refcounting GC, through tracing mark-and-sweep collectors like SGCL or Go's GC). In important ways, all non-moving approaches are more similar to each other (regardless of the use of a GC) than any of them are to moving approaches. (Java did have a concurrent mark-and-sweep collector at one time, but we removed it some years ago)