People seem to think that writing a garbage collector is really hard, a deep magic understood by a few great sages and Hans Boehm (et al). Well it’s not. In fact, it’s rather straight forward. I claim that the hardest part in writing a GC is writing the memory allocator, which is as hard to write as it is to look up the malloc example in K&R.

Ah, C. Still the language of modern high-performance computing.

C is the lowest-level language most programmers will ever use, but it more than makes up for it with raw speed. Just be aware of its manual memory management and C will take you as far as you need to go.