The thing is, the more I work with network based reactive systems, the more a GC seems like an inefficient hack in an application, arising from the fact that we had nothing better at the time it was invented and grew big.

I mean a reactive application needs three things:

- a fast network connection to persistence. If you can't talk quickly to your database, latency eats your response time no matter what you do.

- Maybe some LRU caches across requests, but caches inside an application tend to become a maintenance nightmare quickly. Stales reads are fun, and stalled cache writes are too.

- And beyond that, it should be possible to handle most request data by stack allocation/deallocation with references to a cache version if you have a cache with little overhead, depending on your security requirements.

I understand the ease of use and simplicity of a GC'd language, especially given the time GC'd languages came around big time. But I've always been wondering if you really need a GC if you think properly about request and object lifetimes.