Why does garbage collection make it unsuitable for production use? A lot of production software is written in garbage collected languages like Java. Pretty much the entire backend for iTunes/Apple Music is written in Java, and it's not doing any kind of fancy bump allocator tricks to avoid garbage. In my mind, kind of hard to argue that Apple Music is not "production use".

There are certainly plenty of projects where garbage collection is too slow, but I don't know that they're the majority, and more people would likely prefer memory safety by default.