[pcwalton]

"AFAICT, the best we've been able to accomplish is to provide a easier path to correctness with decent overall performance."

Precisely. Which is why for performance-critical systems code it's important to give the programmer the choice of memory allocation techniques, but to add features to the language to make memory use safer.

Garbage collection is great, but occasionally it falls down and programmers have to resort to manual memory pooling. Then it becomes error-prone (use after free, leaks) without type system help such as regions and RAII.