[cheald]

I did, and I think I might have mis-stated my point. GC thrash is a symptom of the problem, not the core problem itself. Manually managing allocations avoids the "resulting mess" that must be cleaned up from, which is where your big speed boost comes from. In general, the higher up you go, the further abstracted away from memory management you become. It's not that GC is inherently slow or anything, but simply that giving up control of where and how memory is allocated (in exchange for a more flexible language) is the reason for the speed difference.