It's not really being functional that calls for GC -- if you have data structures (whether they're closures, records, or whatever) escaping up from the scope in

It's not really being functional that calls for GC -- if you have data structures (whether they're closures, records, or whatever) escaping up from the scope in which they were created, you have a tricky lifetime question to deal with. In both the imperative and functional cases, you could require explicit allocation and deallocation (like malloc/free), and you could make it automatic (garbage collection). Functional programming tends to use GC because passing/returning closures is a common thing to do. These days, I would say imperative programmers also tend to use GC.