Finalizers are certainly the exception rather than the rule for objects. Deallocation to me represents some action taken for a particular object and scales with the number of objects deallocated. Semi-space copying collectors do not have this property. I think we only disagree on the semantics of "deallocation" — which is why I specified my argument in terms of how things scale. Similarly compacting collectors like Java's CMS also have this scaling property without semi-spaces.