Lambda the Ultimate

The blog post Mobile Web Apps are slow caught my eye. It makes several bold claims: the performance of JavaScript is plateauing, the real problem is memory consumption of web apps, GC performance decreases unless 10 times more memory is available than objects are live, JS memory allocation is too hard to control, GCed languages are unsuited for mobile apps. Unfortunately these claims are only discussed in the context of JS.

Does or would FP suffer from the same problem on systems with limited memory? I would be curious to hear from programmers who use Lua or OCaml for iOS applications about the problems mentioned in the blog post and about GC overhead in FP.

Addendum: The author of the blog post elaborated his post in a much more detailed article
Why mobile web apps are slow. Meanwhile Andreas Rossberg, who works on Google's V8 implementation of JavaScript, explained to me that the SunSpider benchmark is about the worst possible to judge JS performance. For example, SunSpider gives a lot of weight to date operations that are hardly typical for web apps. But sure enough, JS implementations are now really good at it in order to look good when benched with SunSpider.