[gpderetta]

You still want RAII and unique references, but rely on GC for anything shared, as if you had a builtin refererence counted pointer.

I do also believe this might be a sweet spot for a language, but the details might be hard to reconcile.

[umanwizard]

I haven’t used Swift so I might be totally wrong but doesn’t it work sort of like you describe? Though perhaps with ARC instead of true GC, if it followed in the footsteps of Objective-C.

[gpderetta]

Possibly, yes. I haven't used swift either though. Does it have linear/affine types?

Edit: I would also prefer shared nothing parallelism by default so the GC can stay purely single threaded.