In general, memory management needs to be understood as a continuum and not a binary "uses GC or uses manual memory management". Per the very discussion we're h

In general, memory management needs to be understood as a continuum and not a binary "uses GC or uses manual memory management". Per the very discussion we're having, GC is not an atomic thing, and on the other end, what is commonly called "manual memory management" is itself not. malloc still makes non-trivial decisions, as evidenced by the fact that some programs can be greatly benefited or harmed by switching out the malloc it uses. Beyond what most people call "manual memory management" lies "arena allocation", and in the really extreme case, fully static memory layout with no allocation at all. The latter is how NES games were generally written and sufficiently small embedded projects still get written that way today. Further pushing this into a "continuum" rather than a binary flag is that programs can and do freely mix and match. Nothing stops a program from using two mallocs, some arenas, GC for certain values, and static allocations for yet others. The Memory Management Police do not come along and arrest you for having Impure Designs or anything. There are languages like (I believe) Zig where the ability to cleanly do this is more-or-less a first-class language feature.