I'm not making a value judgement. I prefer GC'd languages. I'm saying: if they're not GC'd now, when there are multiple excellent choices for managed-runtime languages, it ain't gonna be GC'd. And obviously, it's not going to be C++.

Ok there I agree with you, however in some domains the choice is made by who is calling the shots and not due the technical merits of some sorts.

Windows is a good example of this politics game actually.

Joe Duffy mentioned on his Rustconf keynote that even with the system running in production, the Windows team couldn't be argued against.

A system that even powered parts of Asian Bing infrastructure.

Likewise they clearly sabotaged the Longhorn efforts, to replace them with COM, and yet UWP, mostly written in C++, happens to usually run slower than traditional .NET applications on Win32, or any other compiled GC'd language on Windows for that matter.

Somehow I think ISRG is not going to try to secure funding to rewrite core Windows components.