You are probably right, but your experience does not disprove the central point that GC always slows things down. Now this slow down may be worth it in most sit

You are probably right, but your experience does not disprove the central point that GC always slows things down. Now this slow down may be worth it in most situations, in fact it may be worth it in 99% of situations, but it is a fact. In some cases that 50 times increase in speed may be important. In some cases, if something is 50 times slower it would be simply unusable. Linus happens to be working on one of those special cases, so he is quite correct in pointing out that garbage collection will always slow things down.