Bob responds: I don’t know that the GC is showing an inherent weakness so much as that it’s tuned for other, more common use cases. Arguably, this issue also shows a downside of making string immutable, but rumblings I’ve heard coming out of Microsoft recently suggest that more immutable collections and objects are in our future, essentially trading memory for thread safety and ease of use.

Something I wish for: a lightweight DataTable without all the versioning cruft and probably with some other little-used features jettisoned. The latter wouldn’t be read-only, but it’d just have one version of each row, without commit / rollback functionality. For many uses, that’s enough. It would have a smaller memory footprint and slightly better performance, and would tend not to create so much fragmentation in the first place. In addition I’d love to see a full-featured DataSet like we already have, but that uses a physical disk file or a DB table for its backing store — in other words, a DataSet of infinite size — like a DataReader, but able to be navigated at will in any direction.