You don't have to go back to the 80's to develop closer to the metal. Neither Rust nor Swift have garbage collection, but both are thoroughly modern, productive languages. I've also been told that C++14 is reasonably pleasant, but I have no personal experience with which to judge.
Swift is garbage-collected – it might not have a tracing GC, but ARC is essentially compile-time GC – certainly, from the perspective of a developer, ARC is extrordinarily similar to a tracing GC (with some small caveats).
