I find it sad that, to this day, one has to spend so much time worrying about memory management to get decent performance. I've yet to work on a performance or

I find it sad that, to this day, one has to spend so much time worrying about memory management to get decent performance. I've yet to work on a performance oriented project where I didn't need to write at least a couple custom allocators to reduce memory management overhead. GC systems are no better in this regard. I was told of an interesting hack in a Java program that implemented a large cache of objects by serializing them into a large memory block so that the GC saw it as one big object and didn't traverse it. This resulting in dramatically reduced GC pause times (10x+). When needed, objects were deserialized from the array. Disgusting, but effective.