> without a garbage collector, that's the novel part?

That's not quite how it works in various languages. You appear to be thinking of the garbage collector as something inseparable from the language.

Both Dlang and Vlang have optional garbage collectors, that can be turned off. In the case of Vlang, none of its libraries depend on the garbage collector. Vlang offers optional (flexible) memory management, somewhat similar to Nim (but they presently don't have optional ownership).

In the case of Julia and Vlang, their optional ownership is new and experimental. Dlang's optional ownership has been around for some years now, showing that it could be done.

Dlang and Vlang allow you to choose the type of memory management (along with some other languages) that you would like to use. Vlang does it by command line flags. You can turn off garbage collection and turn on ownership.