Maybe rust in hindsight was the first language to introduce the borrow checker as an real alternative to either manual memory management or garbage collection.

Maybe rust in hindsight was the first language to introduce the borrow checker as an real alternative to either manual memory management or garbage collection. Maybe we will see a kick-off language based on rust that is much simpler, includes the good parts of rust and is very fast to compile. Another thing I could imagine is an AI based garbage collector, so good that it is on par with manual memory management. In chess we have recently seen AIs (neural networks) taking over the lead and beating the strongest conventional engine (stockfish, written in C++).