It's interesting looking at the different design decisions of languages. One persons pro is another's con.

ATS2 has no GC as the default mode of working too. The only reason it is more verbose is because you need the call to free. ATS strives to be explicit in what it does so it's easier to read the code and know what is happening.

Languages with destructors or implicit function calls seem to lean towards the C++ downside of "What does this code really do" when looking at it. I dislike hidden code where there is no easily identifiable call to tell you something is happening.

It's not all roses and unicorns with ATS either of course. What I really want is the next generation of dependently typed system languages which has learnt from the current ones.