&gt; My experience is that people who like a particular language try to rationalize and convince others that there is no downside.<p>There are always trade-offs.  GC is a win because manual memory management is terrible and error prone, but a lose because you have to learn how to tune it to behave the way you need.  But no matter the language some things stay the same: learn to anticipate what code your compiler is going to generate, check what the optimizer is doing, check the disassembly, use the profiler.  Good GCs and compilers play all the same games with cache locality and such, and some are better than others.  I think you are underestimating the advances in compiler design.  Maybe you think C&#x2F;C++ are fine languages, and that&#x27;s OK, but personally they are the absolute last resort for when I reach limitations of my language&#x27;s compiler and runtime.