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That might work, but I have my doubts. Unless you're calling System.GC() all the time it seems likely that the garbage collector will wait for a bunch to pile up and do it in bursts regardless of how controlled of a pace you release your references at (and calling System.GC() all the time would also likely cause it's own issues). I'd say the real solution needs to involve just plain not using so many tiny objects in the first place.

(It's kind of one of my pet peeves about Java, that the language encourages extensive object use, yet if you use it "too extensively" the code will have performance issues to due excessive allocation/deallocation overhead. In some languages (such as C++) one has the option of combining multiple objects into the same block of allocation, but because all object instances are references in Java there's no such luxury, ironically meaning that high performance java code needs to use simpler/fewer OOP structures than high performance C++ code in order to match the performance)

Also a pet peeve of mine about Robocode at this point. It has a really strict time limit per turn with a programming language that doesn't give you much control at that small of a scope. And even if it did, a rolling average would be soooo much nicer, and skipped turns are such a burden to deal with.

Automated garbage collection is about getting the job done faster/cheaper. Machine code always has more potential for performance than any language and/or paradigm. But in practice, due to overwhelming complexity issues, lower level languages tend to deliver worse software overall.

If you want high performance Java, increase the size of the heap, and/or change the ratio between regions, which solves 99% of garbage collection issues.

We could make it standard in RoboRumble to have a heap optimized for real-time. Using "-Xmn511m -Xmx512m" or "-Xmn1023m -Xmx1024m" in roborumble.bat would do the job very well. Not as fun as programmatic object pooling systems though.