I agree with your disagreement. As a case in point, Nim has packed bitfields but various choices in automatic memory management. As a concrete example, a spel

I agree with your disagreement. As a case in point, Nim has packed bitfields but various choices in automatic memory management. As a concrete example, a spell-check custom-data store uses them here: https://github.com/c-blake/suggest/blob/04e313f8f8d3adf4cb55a8ae0973f815f2b506c6/suggest.nim#L102 https://github.com/c-blake/suggest/blob/04e313f8f8d3adf4cb55... (there the memory is in a memory mapped file and so that code has to manage the space itself.. so, maybe not the perfect example). But I also agree there tends to be a correlation in PLang design in avoiding both low-level memory layout and in manual memory management. But it's just a tendency, not fundamental.