> The difference is that it's deterministic. If you avoid allocation in C/C++/Zig/Rust then you know nothing is going to slow you down, and at worst you have a

> The difference is that it's deterministic. If you avoid allocation in C/C++/Zig/Rust then you know nothing is going to slow you down, and at worst you have a couple of allocations that won't cause a big spike. > With GC you can try to avoid allocations, but you might miss a couple and get occasional frame stutters anyway every now and then. Also avoiding allocation is a whole lot harder in languages that use a GC for everything than languages that provide an alternative Something that I think doesn't get the attention it deserves in Rust is how explicit it makes allocations at the type level. You don't have a pointer that maybe points to the heap and maybe to the stack (or in the case of GC maybe even is on the stack right now but won't be when you change how it's used later) or a slice that you need to track down whether it originated as a reference to a fixed-size array or if it it's dynamically allocated; you have either type that you know is a reference like &T or &str or a slice, or you have a type you know was allocated on the heap like a Box or an Arc or a String or a Vec. I've seen people need to spend a lot of time profiling projects in other languages to track down where they can optimize their memory usage. I wonder if people who are skeptical of languages with expressive type systems might see the benefits more if they were presented less in terms of what the type system provides you directly, but in terms of what it makes available for tooling to take advantage of; in the case of using the type system to track allocations, the advantage might seem limited to your own code and not helpful when handling dependencies without being willing to dive into their code, but I think it's easy to overlook that having the information available statically makes it possible for tooling to utilize it, and that applies just as much to dependencies.