I would probably agree with those scientists, this seems like a “well actually” kind of gotcha claim with no practical significance when there is no usable implementation of this.
The thing was so obscure that even seasoned people who have worked with this for many years didn't know about it.
I guess the takeaway is to stay humble because you never know what you don't know.
Then he carried a grudge.
> If you want automatic garbage collection, there are good commercial and public-domain garbage collectors for C++. For applications where garbage collection is suitable, C++ is an excellent garbage collected language with a performance that compares favorably with other garbage collected languages. See The C++ Programming Language for a discussion of automatic garbage collection in C++. See also, Hans-J. Boehm's site for C and C++ garbage collection.
> Also, C++ supports programming techniques that allows memory management to be safe and implicit without a garbage collector. I consider garbage collection a last choice and an imperfect way of handling for resource management. That does not mean that it is never useful, just hat there are better approaches in many situations.
> C++11 offers a GC ABI.
https://www.stroustrup.com/bs_faq.html#garbage-collection
It seems few remember the days when Java put so much pressure on C++ that Bjarne S was very much trying to find a way to provide GC for those who wanted it. In 2023, the folks wanting GC are all using those languages, and it's assumed C++ is anti-GC.