So you think two different syntaxes for allocating N bytes of automatically managed (i.e stack) memory are in fundamentally different classes of memory manageme

So you think two different syntaxes for allocating N bytes of automatically managed (i.e stack) memory are in fundamentally different classes of memory management because one is slightly more explicit than the other (because a pointer is returned or something I guess?). I don't agree, but at this point, it's semantics. In the literature though, you may find that "manual" memory management usually refers to memory management where the programmer has to call a 'free'-style function manually, while automatic memory management usually refers to anything where the programmer doesn't have to call 'free' (be it thanks to lifetimes or GC or automatic refcounting or whatever).