GC has little relation to optimizations advanced processors
perform.
This may be true in theory; however, from what I've heard and seen,
people writing XSLT processors in languages without automatic garbage
collection have had to spend an enormous amount of effort doing the
memory management, effort which might otherwise have been spent on
rewrite optimizations.
A processor written in C will be faster than a Java processor in the
end, but only after you've written about 5 times as many lines of code;
and even then, it will probably have memory leaks.
Michael Kay
XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list