We’re talking at cross purposes here. I did say that I wasn’t expressing a view as to whether the overheads of manual memory management are typically larger tha

We’re talking at cross purposes here. I did say that I wasn’t expressing a view as to whether the overheads of manual memory management are typically larger than the overheads of GC. I don't know if they are or not. The point I was making was just that you do need to compare empirically the typical overheads of each to make a meaningful comparison. The 6% figure in isolation doesn’t tell us very much. As you point out, it is difficult to make these comparisons on the basis of anything other than anecdotal evidence, since it is rare for applications of significant size or complexity to be implemented in multiple languages.