> which then becomes way more complicated than in a language like Rust which has all this by default. Um, no: 1. Manual memory management doesn't have to be c

> which then becomes way more complicated than in a language like Rust which has all this by default. Um, no: 1. Manual memory management doesn't have to be complex at all - and is arguably much easier to reason about than garbage collection, even if it's more error prone / less guaranteed-to-be-safe 2. Rust's manual memory management (i.e. the default kind of memory management in Rust) is of at least the same complexity as any other sort of manual memory management - if not more due to the need to be explicit around lifetimes and borrowing. The memory management strategy is regardless orthogonal to whether there's a VM involved; there are garbage-collected native languages (Lisp, D) and not-garbage-collected VMs (WASM, or languages like Perl and Tcl if you count reference-counting as "not-garbage-collected") galore.