I remember some years ago, when C# was new, there was a controversy over garbage collection vs. explicit memory management for high transaction server-side applications. The skeptics didn't think garbage collected languages could compete. Then there were some studies showing that garbage collected languages like C# could actually perform better than traditional languages like C++, as long as the application avoided things that could cause garbage collection bottlenecks (many allocations going into the large object heap, many objects whose lifecycle meant they lived more than one generation, etc.).