I've read a lot of really cool papers on GCs that avoid this. The bigger problems arise from languages that take for granted that any abstraction they offer with a memory cost is okay because it offers the user no additional complexity.
For example, languages that use closures have to have very smart compilers or even innocuous functions can create implications for the working set size, which puts the allocator and deallocater under a lot more pressure.
And that's not even the most subtle problem you might run into! A common cause of memory constraints in Java 1.7 and earlier stemmed from subarrays of large arrays. Java made a fairly innocuous decision regarding methods like String.substring that ends up biting a lot of people later on, even as it is the right decision for a slightly different set of performance considerations.
For example, languages that use closures have to have very smart compilers or even innocuous functions can create implications for the working set size, which puts the allocator and deallocater under a lot more pressure.
And that's not even the most subtle problem you might run into! A common cause of memory constraints in Java 1.7 and earlier stemmed from subarrays of large arrays. Java made a fairly innocuous decision regarding methods like String.substring that ends up biting a lot of people later on, even as it is the right decision for a slightly different set of performance considerations.