Zawinski's point is true iff "large application" means an application which allocates and frees plethora of tiny chunks -- however I will argue that this is not a necessity, rather a style coming from a try to port scripting experience to lower-level languages to speed up development. Probably in most cases this is not a problem (no one will notice 100us speedup in GUI), but if one starts to tweak GC or new to rescue efficiency or argue which is better, it is certainly better idea just to write it in C, with all those ugly buffers and pointers. If you already have to track memory use in your mind, why not to just take control of it?