Lately there as been much talking about the performance of managed vs. unmanaged code, by many benchmarks it seems that the newest versions of managed JIT compilers are usually as fast, and sometimes even faster, then the same code written in C++ (in paticular Java 5 seems to be really fast).
Another thing heavily discussed on the net is the performance given by a garbage collector: the latest trend is that a G.C. is better at managing memory then a classic C++ constructor/destructor.
So.. what about writing games in managed languages such as C# or Java?
C# in particular seems to me a good choiche, cause it's much more integrated with the OS, portable to any platform using Mono, and surely it will be optimized a lot in the next few years, cause Longhorn is going to be managed.
Surely using a garbage collector and a true object oriented language would increase a lot productivity and we would get more stable games.