[gpderetta]

It is not. Languages that are designed to run a GC get crippled when run without: depending on the language you might lose access to closures (if dynamically allocated), rich data structures (standard dictionaries, lists, etc), sometimes even aggregates (if boxed by default) and you have to resort to using arrays of primitive types.

As they say, you can write FORTRAN in any language, but you don't necessarily want to (this is unfair to modern fortran which I hear is actually a decent language).