Yup, you don't want to be doing manual memory management until you've done the profiling and found your hot-paths. However, the set of problems I can tackle is

Yup, you don't want to be doing manual memory management until you've done the profiling and found your hot-paths. However, the set of problems I can tackle is going to be bounded by the escape-hatches that are available to me. Much like Rust has `unsafe {}`, being able to drop down to the bare metal is an important tool to be used at the appropriate time.