> Personally I think the notion that C++ offers "precise control" as you call it is overrated. For instance flexiblememory allocation is touted as an advantage,

> Personally I think the notion that C++ offers "precise control" as you call it is overrated. For instance flexiblememory allocation is touted as an advantage, but in practice this is limited by the fact that there is only one global implementation of new the operator. I don't quite follow, who's stopping you from using sbrk(), mmap() and all the other low level allocation system calls if you really have to? AFAIK, many high performance applications have their own allocation mechanism. Furthermore, new/malloc is worlds apart from GC when it comes to precise memory management. Now, to be fair, I have no experience implementing high performance servers. But speaking for games, GC gets in the way a lot. You can make it work by essentially avoiding allocation altogether, at least on systems where you can use tons of memory, but that's just a very crude workaround.