Yeah, managing memory with malloc and free directly was a nightmare. Back when I worked with Java, however, GC still suffered from unpredictable performance as

Yeah, managing memory with malloc and free directly was a nightmare. Back when I worked with Java, however, GC still suffered from unpredictable performance as well as a requirement to have much larger heaps. Are these now mostly solved problems? If not, what do you think of something like this (syntax aside): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_pointer#C.2B.2B_smart_pointers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_pointer#C.2B.2B_smart_poi... My personal experience with similar such systems was that even when performance was not a concern the cost of having to untangle and document my reference structure was well worth the time. Has any language ever gotten the balance of tradeoffs for finalizers right for strong GC?