Garbage collection and controlled object lifetimes are important and orthogonal concerns. You can have both at the same time. C# for instance lets you add a Dispose() method for the times when you want to free the resources now. There are even ways to ensure statically that objects aren't used after the close/dispose is called. (Of which I would find the paper, but my google-fu is failing me right now ... https://okmij.org/ftp/Haskell/regions.html and https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.02796 I think)