Tom quotes Stephan T. Lavavej:"Garbage collection is a morally bankrupt idea". In my opinion, most developers seem to naively think that Garbage Collection is bad and expensive. They assert that nothing can beat malloc( )/free( ) based explicit (or implicit, via destructors invoked on leaving a scope) resource management. In fact, unless it is a good implementation of malloc( )/free( ), how can you even be sure that these functions will return in a "reasonable" amount of time, every time? You can have sudden stalls under heavy conditions even with these, just as with a garbage collector. Many nice articles and eye-openers on Garbage Collection can be found at Hans Boehm's site. This article is particularly relevant.