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It makes some things easier, and some things harder, or more complex.

So I can deny that most development becomes easier with GC. At least if you also intend to actually run the thing. Running Java means forever fighting the GC, needing to do runtime and development to reduce impact of inherent GC problems.

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You are right that I was talking about delivering a first working version, not about tuning performance. It could be argued that optimizing for memory (de)allocation so early in the development is a case of premature optimization. Sadly, I don't know a (good) path from gc-based development to safe manual memory management, so I'll keep that counter-argument for the day I see one such path :)

Yeah, the problem with that kind of thing is that GC languages disincentivizes thinking about ownerships, and tacking ownership on after the fact is basically a rewrite.

Now that Haskell has linear types, perhaps we'll see some new ideas emerge?

But it's a Java issue: Java relies on Heap Objects way too much. C# and the CLR behind it has a much better support for value types and stack allocations, where some optimization can even be done by the JIT compiler.

While I don't have much experience with C#, and I agree that Java is the worst, this at least applies to Go as well. Though to a lesser degree.

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