This makes two JWZ references I've handed out today, but this is pretty relevant: http://www.jwz.org/doc/gc.html

Memorable quote:

"It's a common belief that garbage collection means inferior performance, because everyone who has gotten into programming in the last decade regards manual storage management as a fact of life, and totally discounts the effort and performance impact of doing everything by hand.

In a large application, a good garbage collector is more efficient than malloc/free. "