Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is not that you can't manually allocate memory, it's that you cannot not automatically allocate memory.
That's debatable, as you can write the code in such way that it does not trigger allocations in a specific situation where it might be critical. Having used Native Oberon in the 90's, I became convinced that system programming languages with GC are possible. Latest versions of AOS even had video players with good framerate written in Active Oberon, with some Assembly snippets. However, in the Oberon family, besides N…
Don't get me wrong, I do 90% of my coding in a garbage-collected language. But any mandatory GC does limit your domain.