The biggest problem is that nobody actually made a programming language with a GC that is worth using for system level programming. In theory nothing prevents the existence of such a language but it simply doesn't exist. For example, stop the world pauses are the primary reason why languages with a GC are unsuitable for systems programming. You can write one heavily optimized critical section that runs in real time and then be interrupted by some unrelated unoptimized low priority code that allocated memory and triggered a GC stop the world pause. Basically average performance in a GC language is dictated by the slowest performing section of the code base. A trivial model that avoids this problem would be a language where each thread has its own garbage collector. If a slow code path triggers a collection cycle it will not interrupt other threads. The second problem is that using a library written in a managed language requires initialization of the runtime. One could resolve this problem by switching away from C FFI to shared memory IPC where a separate process is running in the background.