Not to take away from anything you've said, but in some scenarios, GCs have a lower impact on performance than dynamic allocation (well, if you use dynamic allocation). For one, they provide better throughput -- their overhead is mostly much higher memory usage, and latency (occasional pauses, although "pauseless" collectors -- actually, short pauses of a few milliseconds -- are used in the industry). But their more interesting advantage is in concurrent data structures. Many lock-free data structures (actually, most of the interesting ones) require a GC, or techniques that are less performant, less general, or both, like hazard pointers and user-space RCU.