My experience with Option 2, is that unless you're not memory-constrained, you'll always reach a point where you need to be GC-aware. Those objects you kept a r

My experience with Option 2, is that unless you're not memory-constrained, you'll always reach a point where you need to be GC-aware. Those objects you kept a reference two? GC can't collect them. This hot path that does allocations ? Better implement an object pool.