It's probably worth noting that the Java garbage collector does suffer from many of the same problems, even if there are no "scheduled" runs. The main problem here is that the gc runs in a "stop the world" fashion. I'm not sure if that can be avoided completely.

If you know what you are doing you can of course write code that never produces garbage that isn't removed by the refcounter and turn of scheduled GC runs entierly. But that moved the solution from Pike to the programmer.