You say a lot of things without justification: "IMO garbage collection is the epitome of sunk cost fallacy. Thirty years of good research thrown at a bad idea."

You say a lot of things without justification: "IMO garbage collection is the epitome of sunk cost fallacy. Thirty years of good research thrown at a bad idea." "Garbage collection is just plain bad." And more. > The reality is we as developers choose not to give languages enough context to accurately infer the lifetime of objects. Possibly because it's hard and until compilers + maths developed enough, it wasn't possible. Maybe. I dunno, but there's probably a reason Rust didn't appear in the 1970s. They're probably harder to use than conventional langs, judging by what I read about Rust's borrow checker (dunno, Rust's on my todo list so no actual experience). > we have a giant for loop that iterates over all of memory over and over and over to guess when we're done with things This is from memory so I may be wrong, but a conservative GC will iterate over the whole memory but if you're using one of those you've probably got other problems because yes, conservative GCs do 'guess'. (Edit: and when it guesses wrongly it can fail to free, causing leaks. And some optimisations that temporarily make pointer values 'disappear' can cause premature frees of the object pointed to. I believe an example of the latter is using branch-free XOR on pointers to swap them. 'proper'). Most modern systems will use something more sophisticated and known-correct such as tracing and will trace just the live stuff. Mark-compact for sure only touches live data which makes it efficient for functional langs (for some definition of 'efficient', I have questions). I'd recommend reading a book ('The Garbage Collection Handbook: The Art of Automatic Memory Management' 2nd edition, Richard Jones et al) before abusing GC. I actually agree with some of what you're saying but you need to say why. > It wastes time, it wastes space, it wastes energy. I quite possibly agree! (see a recent previous post where I call lack of optimisation in scala 'immoral') But if you just give your opinion without some solid backup I can't endorse you. Please read the GC book, it really is very good indeed. The author's a nice guy too, met him years ago.