[kjeetgill]

From a Java programmer's perspective: I agree that a majority of your could would function just as well with RAII-style deallocations. That said, it's not too rare to throw objects around in queues or hashmaps and the garbage collector can save you from sloppy code turning into memory leaks.

Also consider, GC can "solve" a number of other issues. malloc() and free() aren't always cheap to do in the critical path especially when you have heap fragmentation. There are solutions without GCs, but compacting generational GCs combat both of these things without requiring you to even be aware of them. I'm not claiming they're always the best solutions but hopefully I've explained their motivations.