My 2-cents. My first penny: Although the thought of having memory-leaks become a concept of the past is pretty nifty to me by using a memory-managing programming language, the "garbage collectors" of today make no promises to the programmer about any other type of resource. Brute-force programming and RAII are our current protections against mismanaging these other resource types. If we end up using RAII in our apps because object destructors must be called in deterministic fashion, then the advantage of GC almost becomes irrelevant. My second penny: There is one feature of an advanced GC that is super-beneficial to me however. The C++/CLI garbage collector has the ability to perform data compaction. Basically, when the GC activates, it removes the unused objects, and then fills in the vacated memory gaps with existing live objects, thus compressing memory usage. This ability can help you create applications that can run 24/7 ( basically forever ) without having any memory fragmentation. This to me is a better feature of the garbage collector. I personally don't know how the CLI engine performs this neat trick but it works, and the code generated by the compiler is crisp, compact and efficient. I don't know if there's a C++ based GC library out there that does this sort of thing. Ok, one final cent: The GC's provided within programming languages are much more compelling than library-based ones. For me, the way they can be improved is by following these simple rules: 1) Eliminate all object memory that is no longer referenced ( standard feature ) 2) Have destructor functions be called in a deterministic manner ( finalizers optional ) 3) Have data compaction within the memory manager 4) Have the ability to manage other system resources as well 5) Provide the ability to manually manage specific resources ( for RTOS ) The "Garbage Collector" should be ideally renamed to "Resource Manager". Until these features mentioned above are given to me by a single language infrastructure, I believe I will be forced to resort to RAII as my most-trusted tool. -Sid Sacek