You can control the GC by not allocating, or by allocating off-heap, when you need to. It is totally possible to write kernels, DBMSes, network stacks, etc. in

You can control the GC by not allocating, or by allocating off-heap, when you need to. It is totally possible to write kernels, DBMSes, network stacks, etc. in GC languages. Whether a particular language makes that nice enough to be more worth using than a non-GC language is another question.