"""And then we get onto secondary claims, e.g. benefits of garbage collection. (See the pretty graph)""" The pretty graphs are actually very misleading. The g

"""And then we get onto secondary claims, e.g. benefits of garbage collection. (See the pretty graph)""" The pretty graphs are actually very misleading. The graphs that drop down in the Lua version actually show the system load and not memory usage. So it shows nothing about garbage collection. If you look at the process list in for the Objective-C version you can see that some other process, 'installd', is hogging most of the CPU. I bet the author was syncing with iTunes or installing some software while running these tests. What you can see in the Instruments screenshots is that the Lua version uses about 200KB more memory for the 'same' application.