Do you mean "thread local passed to another thread by mistake"? There is an option to make data global instead. Unless it is a Unix pipeline kind of design, ind

Do you mean "thread local passed to another thread by mistake"? There is an option to make data global instead. Unless it is a Unix pipeline kind of design, independent threads can populate their working set (from file/socket/whatever) into thread-local memory. It depends on whether shared-memory is a design requirement or an implementation artifact (Erlang does just fine with a largely shared-nothing model). It also depends on whether a program runs for a short time, or for a long time. If you are running for a short time, why not just avoid the GC entirely; "manage" memory manually by malloc-ing and never free-ing (free-ing too takes time, and doesn't make memory available to other processes anyway).