To the original point, at least C/C++ allow you to do this type of memory management, even if it's not the 'default' strategy. It's not so clear how you would achieve something like this in Go or Java.
Agreed. I wasn't contesting that point at all, just elaborating.
Most of the time for most people, the risk of arbitrarily long pauses from malloc/free is only a theoretical concern. Pauses from your typical GC are a practical concern more often.
Reference counting lies in the middle. If you drop the last reference to a big part of your object graph, it can take an arbitrarily long time to clean up as well.
You can bound it by either being careful how you construct (and deconstruct) your object graph at application level; or you can go for a more sophisticated real-time variant of reference counting.
Google has lots of hits for 'real time reference counting'.
