Fair! I actually kind of like Go but it's not a language I reach for very often. Still, the point I was making is that it's possible to have garbage collectors

Fair! I actually kind of like Go but it's not a language I reach for very often. Still, the point I was making is that it's possible to have garbage collectors that get very low pause times (sub millisecond in Go's case [1]). It might still be an issue for a kernel or microcontroller, I'm not suggesting we always use a GC for every project, I don't think most people would, but I am suggesting that there are a lot of projects (most projects?) that would be better off using a low-latency GC instead of trying to handle memory directly. Even the JVM is getting better about this; there's already experimental support for a low-latency GC in some distributions of OpenJDK [2], which reportedly gets sub-millisecond pauses as well. If you have JVM support then you have access to good languages like Clojure. Personally, I actually think I'm reasonably-ok with manually managing memory, I've cut my teeth on enough C to write code that doesn't generally crash, but I still reach for a garbage collector whenever possible. Just because I think I'm capable of doing manual memory management doesn't mean that I think it's worth it for most things; nearly everything I do touches a network at some point, which means that avoiding latency is not really possible a lot of the time. [1] https://groups.google.com/g/golang-dev/c/Ab1sFeoZg_8 https://groups.google.com/g/golang-dev/c/Ab1sFeoZg_8 [2] https://wiki.openjdk.org/display/shenandoah/Main https://wiki.openjdk.org/display/shenandoah/Main