[pjmlp]

Have a look at Spin or Native Oberon, just to name two operating systems written in GC enabled languages.

Before C existed, there were already operating systems written in PL/I and ALGOL, which provide better type safety and memory management as C or C++.

Unix and C success has regressed what meant to be a proper systems programming language.

There is even a paper from Adele Goldberg about this phenomena, unfortunately I cannot recall the title now.