I am a bit surprised by most of the discussion here so far. Garbage collection has first of all one fundamental advantage: correctness. You are guaranteed never

I am a bit surprised by most of the discussion here so far. Garbage collection has first of all one fundamental advantage: correctness. You are guaranteed never ever to have a pointer to a freed object and that any unreachable object does get freed. For almost all programs that get written, correctness should go over speed. And speaking of speed, unless you require hard realtime behavior, garbage collection can be quite beneficial. A generational GC offers faster allocation times than any malloc based allocator, and the collection of the nursery generation is instantaneous in most cases. ARC has the overhead of counting for each referencing/dereferencing and while it might predictable about kicking in when killing a reference frees memory, the time required to free a given object completely depends on how much objects get consequently freed. Furthermore, garbage collection helps to write clean code, as it is safe (and usually cheap) to allocate memory during a function call and return results referencing the memory. Of course, badly written programs might perform badly with GC - but without the same kind of programs would just be a disaster. And most strategies for efficient memory usage used in non-GC languages (e.g. memory pools for certain objects) can and should be equally used in GC languages.