> Because I think it's a lot harder (both for you and for your users) than you thought at the time, and I hoped you wouldn't waste your time (and your users' time) on it.

I believe it is possible to offer such a feature without declarative baggage. If it's not, then I don't want it ;-)

> Personally, I think GC is the way to go to keep your (programmers') sanity. If you worry about GC pauses in time-critical sections, provide for a way to turn off the GC temporarily for such sections.

It might be even possible to leverage Scopes' support for compile-time introspection to write contextual GC's from within the language. I haven't explored that yet. In games development we usually prefer to allocate in frames, stages or on custom stacks, so that's also a way to do it.

Installing a GC at the lowest level is a brutal choice that precludes many other possible ways this could go, so I'm cautious.