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Also they're targeting a BBC:Microbit, which has an nRF51822 - the smaller version with only 16 kB of RAM. 16 kB! How is garbage collection going to work here for anything but the most trivial examples?

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You can run MicroPython on the nRF51822. That's a GC language. I've ran some fairly complex programs on it.

Lack of careful programming and you run out of memory, but that's more a function of assuming you have a large memory space, not GC in general.

I think the person you’re replying to means a GC that needs headroom, not a GC like Python’s which generally doesn’t.

FWIW micropython replace's cpython's refcount-with-cycle-breaker by a mark-and-sweep GC: https://github.com/micropython/micropython/wiki/Memory-Manag...

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