My comments were about "big" self-contained projects for which it's worth it to have their own internal infrastructure and idioms etc. An example would be a com

My comments were about "big" self-contained projects for which it's worth it to have their own internal infrastructure and idioms etc. An example would be a compiler or an interpreter or a web server. For smallish programs like what you describe, I agree that manual memory management can be decent overhead. Many "big" projects try to reduce the memory management hassles by embedding an interpreted language such as Tcl or Lua for implementing non-performance intensive tasks. I'm not advocating writing everything in C++, but with the right tools and in the right circumstances, the benefits of C++ can outweigh the annoyance of manual memory management. Another reason I'm skeptical of garbage collection is because I read that unless you do things in a specific way you can have references hanging around in Java resulting in memory bloat.