Why garbage collection is a good thing

IBM’s developerWorks site is always bringing something awesome to the table. This week there’s an article talking about Java performance (and the myths). Go check it out! Java theory and practice: Urban performance legends, revisited My biggest reason for liking the garbage collector in Java is because it frees the programmer from having to worry so much about memory allocation/deallocation. And if you want to read between the lines on that last sentence I’m saying “It help prevent a whole lot of memory leak related errors”. Also check out jwz’s thoughts on garbage collection, he hits a lot of really great points.