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C++ the Clear Winner In Google's Language Performance Tests
Paul Dubuc writes "Google has released a research paper (PDF) that suggests C++ is the best-performing language on the market. It's not for everyone, though. They write, '...it also required the most extensive tuning efforts, many of which were done at a level of sophistication that would not be available to the average programmer.'"
A GC is a net loss, but don't think it doesn't have good effects mixed in there. Allocation of memory is a few instructions with a GC; malloc() can't hope to be in that same league. On a whole, GCs improve the memory locality of your program as it runs, with some substantial hiccups at the collections; manual memory management hinders it as your heap becomes more fragmented.
On a whole I think most programs nowadays should be written in a managed language; the performance gap just doesn't matter for most things.