I'm responding really late because I didn't check my threads for a while, but in response to your first point, there's plenty of GC'd languages that can give yo

I'm responding really late because I didn't check my threads for a while, but in response to your first point, there's plenty of GC'd languages that can give you type safety and compiler checks. As others have pointed out, Java, TypeScript and Go are fairly solid compiled languages with GC. If you want more type safety, Scala, F#, Ocaml and Haskell all have extremely powerful type systems that I personally find very useful when working on complicated business logic (my personal favorite is Ocaml). In the more exotic space, Nim has a really cool cross between ARC and GC, and comes with dependent types for extra safety! GC is not perfect, and as you point out, a "stop the world" GC can cause more pain than is saved from not having to do manual memory management, but I think there's a lot of good work in the space that makes me think really hard about picking up a language that would require manual memory management.