That's not a reasonable conclusion to draw. You would need to preallocate to maximize performance regardless of GC in this case, and in other cases, the performance and determinism gaps between GC languages and non-GC languages is almost entirely due to tertiary factors. For example, GC languages are more likely to prioritize friendliness over raw performance in other areas--language features, compiler optimizations, standard library design, etc. Non-GC languages really only need to appeal to the high-performance and high-determinism crowds.