Maybe I should make the argument as to why ETS is not garbage collected. It is a pragmatic solution to an often occurring problem in software.
You have a lot of data.
You rarely change that data.
You still have to walk over it when you garbage collect.
ETS allows you to store Erlang terms into a tuple space outside the heap of any process. This means you avoid garbage collecting, and you can have 120 gigabyte of RSS, but only have to collect 400 megabytes of those. If you look at how many "mmap" implementations there are for GC'ed languages, and if you have ever reached for one, you know what I'm talking about.
You have a lot of data.
You rarely change that data.
You still have to walk over it when you garbage collect.
ETS allows you to store Erlang terms into a tuple space outside the heap of any process. This means you avoid garbage collecting, and you can have 120 gigabyte of RSS, but only have to collect 400 megabytes of those. If you look at how many "mmap" implementations there are for GC'ed languages, and if you have ever reached for one, you know what I'm talking about.