> Consider a very large tree of objects which are referenced through a single root node That's predictable and can be planned for: You can hold onto the refere

> Consider a very large tree of objects which are referenced through a single root node That's predictable and can be planned for: You can hold onto the reference until you get to a point where the pause is acceptable. You can't do that in a garbage collected language, because you have no control over when the garbage collector will pause. (In theory your application can explicitly trigger a garbage collection, but in practice such behavior is discouraged.)