@kentpitman @screwlisp @cdegroot @ramin_hal9001 Your understanding is mostly faulty. The original GC was written by me, and I'm no Lisp GC expert. I was (and still am) an admirer of Lisp. I wrote the code for my whole PhD thesis in Lisp. My admiration for garbage collection started earlier, when I was a big user of Simula in the 70s. But the motivation for GC in Java was different: the motivation was all about reliability and security. A leading cause of security vulnerabilities as always been buggy code. And one of the leading root causes of many long standing, hard to diagnose and fix, bugs has been flakey storage management. Garbage collection goes a long way to increasing system reliability, and hence security. I had always wanted to make GC more mainstream.

When you described garbage collection to senior management back in the day, their reflexive judgement was: "bullshit! Lazy engineers just don't want to clean up their mess". But when they see measureable improvements in system robustness, and corresponding decreases in failures, they Notice.

“Systems are seductive. They promise to do a hard job faster, better, and more easily than you could do it by yourself. But if you set up a system, you are likely to find your time and effort now being consumed in the care and feeding of the system itself." — John Gall

A nice summary of:

“Lessons from John Gall”

here:

https://www.antoinebuteau.com/lessons-from-john-gall/