C vs GC is a false dichotomy.
There can be safer-than-C languages that don't use GC, e.g. you don't need GC for array bounds checking. You can use reference counting for more deterministic garbage collection.
There can be safer-than-C languages that don't use GC, e.g. you don't need GC for array bounds checking. You can use reference counting for more deterministic garbage collection.
No problems here.
EDIT: Objective-C doesn't solve the problem at all. (More precisely, it requires manual intervention by the programmer.) See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6260256/what-kind-of-leak...
From the article: "This occurs when one object has a strong pointer to another, but the target object has a strong pointer back to the original."
Some backrground info on Objective-C's memory management: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7874342/what-is-the-diffe...
It's an interesting approach to insert release calls at compile time. Maybe it's worth not solving the cyclic reference problem in exchange for determinism. Thank you for pointing that out.
The question of cycles is even more pertinent with ARC, because it's easy to get used to letting the compiler do everything for you, and it's easy to miss an occasional leak of a cyclic object graph.
I don't think cyclic object graphs are needed to, say, respond to a TLS heartbeat without out-of-bounds reads.