I think Rust demonstrates the quote is wrong, but the article was written in 2007, before Rust was public and well before the core system of borrow- and "lifeti

I think Rust demonstrates the quote is wrong, but the article was written in 2007, before Rust was public and well before the core system of borrow- and "lifetime"-checking was implemented for it, so it wasn't "obviously" wrong at that time. Also, Rust does provide reference counting pointers and these are sometimes necessary; this can be considered a form of GC, although I have a feeling its not in the spirit of the quote. (I believe there were some research languages around that tackled this sort of task, but I'm not sure how many tried to tackle the general heap.)