By game programmers you probably mean AAA console game programmers. I was once one, and I know that those games have to account for every byte of memory. Garbag

By game programmers you probably mean AAA console game programmers. I was once one, and I know that those games have to account for every byte of memory. Garbage collection has not only cpu overhead which can be unpredictable, it also requires memory to potentially sit around unused waiting for the next cycle. Your question is what is our budget for gc in terms of cpu work and memory overhead, and the answer is zero for both.