GC is actually a hard requirement for some problem domains such as anything making heavy use of general graphs. (One well-known example of that is GOFAI applications, which are commonly implemented in LISP.)
> GC is actually a hard requirement for some problem domains such as anything making heavy use of general graphs.
This is manifestly false. I used to write general graph analysis kernels on supercomputers. We used (old-style) C++ and never had an issue with memory management. Your assertion is assuming a naive implementation that would have offered poor performance regardless.
There is no implication that memory is not being reused. You seem to be assuming how graphs are represented in large-scale systems which are not actually correct in practice.
