> The biggest of said problems is that the garbage collector has the annoying habit to “pause the world”.
I think that main problem of garbage-collected programs is that they usually allocate several times more RAM than they use. This causes excessive swapping which produces more noticeable lags than just garbage collection. I vaguely remember reading somewhere that the difference can be 6x, but I am not sure if this is the correct number. This means that garbage-collected software is great for large expensive servers stuffed with RAM sticks but not so great for a personal computer having just 4 or 2 Gb.
I think that main problem of garbage-collected programs is that they usually allocate several times more RAM than they use. This causes excessive swapping which produces more noticeable lags than just garbage collection. I vaguely remember reading somewhere that the difference can be 6x, but I am not sure if this is the correct number. This means that garbage-collected software is great for large expensive servers stuffed with RAM sticks but not so great for a personal computer having just 4 or 2 Gb.