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Sure, if you’re using pre-1990’s memory management. Best practices have evolved far beyond the explicit use of malloc & free and unsafe string handling.

Most popular dynamic languages don’t use garbage collection under the hood anyway. In Python and many other runtimes, it’s primarily reference counted.

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Python largely only gets away with ref counting because it doesn't support concurrent access. The GIL means it's basically single-threaded ref counting, which is much cheaper than an actual atomic ref count (like std::shared_ptr)

Scattering atomic ref counts everywhere gets extremely expensive very quickly.

Python still uses mark and sweep occasionally to clean up structures where reference counting fails.

It has optional cycle detection, yep. But... you could also just spend a couple of minutes to not have cyclic references.

Closures are objects that can participate in cycles. And the lifetime of closures is very hard to track statically.

They are and they should be used responsibly. I’d argue sparingly also.

"A couple of minutes"

Just a little bit overconfident.

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