almost all GCs are awful

Wrong -- almost all of the most visible GCs in the most popular languages are either 1) still awful or 2) were formerly awful for such a long time, they're still living it down.

It's a vicious cycle.

    - GCs have a bad rep.  
    - Precocious programmer implementes their own dynamic language.  
    - They settle for Mark/Sweep or ref counts to "get it done" 
       (Hey, GCs are all awful anyhow, yeah?)
    - Many people experience the awfulness.
    - GCs have a bad rep -- REPEAT

Chicken & egg? GCs were bad. Experts have since figured out how to make them good. The programmer culture in general is slowly getting this knowledge by diffusion.

The VisualWorks GC is so good, as a lark, I once put an infinite loop into the app I was working on that did nothing but instantiate new objects. I could barely tell it was there!

so the 'almost all' in my above is wrong? you basically said what I said, but with your favorite smalltalk GC.

Yes, the GCs you've heard of constitutes an encyclopedic listing of them. </sarcasm>

Hmmm, you just gave me an idea. Interview question to see if prospect knows what he doesn't know. Does she/he even have the order of magnitude right on that?

actually, in this day and age... if you hit disk for paging/swap on a production server... "you are doing it wrong"... this should not be an issue