>>59
Let's forget about C++ for a second and simply concentrate on Vala. I'm fairly certain Vala uses ref'd gc for everything, and all objects are allocated on the heap- yet the benchmarks[1] show it's pretty much on-par with C and C++ in terms of speed.
Just skimming a few of the benchmarks shows they are using objects and writing pretty much idiomatic Vala code, so I'm not sure what the problem with ref counting actually is.
Are saying is with a real GC scheme, Vala would be even faster?
[1]
http://code.google.com/p/vala-benchmarks/wiki/BenchResults