I'm playing the devil's advocate a bit. I come from a compiler background. If your language has strong memory guarantees, a good compiler might even be able to

I'm playing the devil's advocate a bit. I come from a compiler background. If your language has strong memory guarantees, a good compiler might even be able to eliminate temporary allocations completely in some cases, which is pretty neat (ie: make you think you're heap allocating something, when in reality it's on the stack, or in registers).