Doesn garbage collection make programs slow?
No. In The Measured Cost of Conservative Garbage Collection, Zorn finds that: the CPU overhead of conservative garbage collection is comparable to that of explicit storage management techniques. […] Conservative garbage collection performs faster than some explicit algorithms and slower than others, the relative performance being largely dependent on the program. Note also that the version of the conservative collector used in this paper is now rather old and the collector has been much improved since then. Relevant publications: • Benjamin Zorn. 1993. The Measured Cost of Conservative Garbage Collection.
