How modern is modern, and who's implemented it? In recent memory (last decade or so) I've had to work around the GC by doing exactly what you describe with arrays as well as off-heap storage to avoid memory footprint and pause issues across Java, Go, and Javascript. Writing something like say Objective C (with its refcounting, autorelease pools, etc) seemed pretty productive, had predictable behavior, etc. I follow GC development a bit, and often cite some of the stuff Gil Tene has written as an example of clear technical writing and thinking, but I'm not convinced GC is that universally good. Rust's approach has a high ergonomics cost but the Swift people seem to get by.