> With Rust and C++ (don't know about Swift), you s still have to spend a lot of time thinking about memory.

You don't think about memory, you just think about how to ensure that you're always referencing live objects. And you need that kind of thinking anyway to deal with non-memory resources, where a GC won't help you at all.

"You can't garbage collect file descriptors" is a very weak argument.

My argument is that you always need to think about memory - even in GC languages. Being able to not think about memory is not a feature, it is a problem.

Why? It's a low-level implementation detail. Should you also always think about registers and jumps?

It is absolute not a low level detail, it is a huge part of your application and cannot be ignored.

Interesting, I've made many programs without caring about memory management and they worked just fine.

It completely depends on what application you're creating if it can be ignored or not.

You can just ignore it all almost as long as you stick to RAII and keep customizing allocators where you need. It is quite reasonable bc you can start to code fast and later imprpve performance in the allocation patterns.

There are other ways such as customozong new/delete.

Custom allocators definitely count as thinking about memory. Possibly also RAII.

True. But pauses due to a GC also counts as thinking about memory...

Depends on your situation what you can or cannot do/afford.