Comment by jerf

Ultimately, the entire problem of deallocation in general is a continuum, not a binary, and I tend to find it hard to take anyone seriously who is vigorously arguing about how awful GC is if they don't understand that and indicate some understanding of the concept. The closest you can get to real "manual" memory management on a modern system is to use nothing but arena allocations, and if you really want "manual" memory management, you need to allocate some small fixed number of arenas, because if you're constantly allocating and deallocating them that is itself probably an automated process that could go wrong, at least in theory. Malloc/free or new/delete isn't really "manual memory management".

The wide variety of options and tradeoffs, with fewer clear lines in the sand than most people seem to think, is already enough to call it a "continuum" but what really finishes the job is that they're all mixable and matchable. Something like Zig makes that really obvious, but most static languages have at least some sort of ability to mix in multiple strategies. There's nothing wrong with a C++ program that uses new & delete, and also uses arenas for some things, and also uses garbage collection for some things, and also has an integrated scripting language like Lua with its own memory strategies. Such programs are not that uncommon... that describes modern games nowadays, the supposed canonical case where you "can't afford GC". But it can... it just fences it in to a particular domain where it fits.