Fun fact: Erlang is built to assume that most processes are "missiles" in this sense. GC is quite slow (though only blocks the individual actor being collected), but most actors never perform enough allocations+deallocations across their lifetime to ever incur a GC collection.

One of the main ways to tune Erlang systems for speed is to figure out the amount of memory each type of actor will need, and pass an option to spawn the actor with an arena pre-allocated to that size, so that it can just quietly do its job and quit, never having asked to allocate or deallocate at all.