[pjmlp]

> To me they're very discrete things, if you can't manually manage memory(raw pointers and the like) then it's not a System Programming language.

Having a GC doesn't forbid that, in very specific cases.

Mesa/Cedar, Modula-2+, Modula-3, Oberon, Oberon-2, Active Oberon, Component Pascal, System C#, Swift, D are all examples of such languages.

[Manishearth]

Rust, too, had an optional GC (where the choice is per-data, not global) for a long time and still intended to be a systems language (And was pretty successful at being systemsy IMO). I think there was a time when &-pointers didn't exist and all sharing was done through the GC too. At one point there was a realization that the new borrowing system could be used to write GC-less programs pretty easily, and that was a turning point after which the GC started being phased out in community usage and eventually removed from the language.

[vvanders]

I never said anything about having a GC, just that if you can't poke directly at memory when you need to then you're going to have a heck of a time working on the Systems Programming space.

[mseepgood]

> if you can't poke directly at memory when you need to then you're going to have a heck of a time working on the Systems Programming space

That's possible in go with unsafe.Pointer. Go's runtime, GC and memory allocator are written in Go and make use of this.

[nickpsecurity]

Also remember Go was inspired a lot by Oberon-2. The Oberon languages were used for writing operating systems despite a GC. They just used assembly or UNSAFE constructs for stuff the type-safe or GC parts couldn't handle.

[pjmlp]

As mseepgood already replied, you can do that in Go.