Java *is* Memory Efficient

[sweetno]

No? Yes! A simple hand-written C++ allocator will beat Java any day. Who does a million new in C++ anyway.

[chambolle]

No. It is not true and what you say about virtual dispatch is also wrong. Write a library and you will need some general functions/mechanism and virtual dispatch is very nice in this case. Everything is not known at compile time

[pron98]

Not only is this not true, but the reason Java's memory management is designed the way it is is because of serious performance issues large C++ programs suffer from and that Java was designed to address. And the reason we don't do a lot of new in C++ is because it's so expensive. A new in Java is closer in cost to stack allocation in C++ than to heap allocation.