Memory leaks can be hard to track down, but overflows and use after free bugs can take a project weeks off schedule. Depending on what is overwritten and where,

Memory leaks can be hard to track down, but overflows and use after free bugs can take a project weeks off schedule. Depending on what is overwritten and where, the effects show up very far from the source of the problem. For an engineering or product manager this is a terrifying prospect. Managed memory more or less solves those problems - it introduces a couple of others and there are still a possibility of resource leaks but these problems are both more rare and generally easier to pin down.