&quot;AFAIK ALGOL 68 was garbage collected and so where many safe languages of that period, so no...&quot;<p>Garbage collection is not mentioned in ALGOL68 report at all. There&#x27;s a link to it on Wikipedia page if you want to check. Not ALGOL60, either. It wasn&#x27;t in Pascal, Modula-2, or original Ada 1983 rationale either. PL&#x2F;0 of MULTICS, PL&#x2F;1 &amp; PL&#x2F;S of IBM, ESPOL&#x2F;NEWP of Burroughs, or Mesa at Xerox didn&#x27;t have it either. All had various enhancements for safety in quite a few forms. So, I have no idea where you&#x27;re getting that information from. Disinformation, most likely, that was probably given to you by those who didn&#x27;t study history and strawmaned up reasons safer, non-GC languages couldn&#x27;t exist. ;)<p>Note: Dynamic memory allocation generally had to be done carefully since there was no GC. Yet, the other safety features of the language helped reduce the number of problems you&#x27;d run into. Especially those that discouraged directly working with pointers.<p>Now, let&#x27;s look at memory safety. C was a language designed specifically for PDP-11 &amp; its model. Burrough&#x27;s B5000 (1961) was a machine custom-designed for ALGOL and its philosophy. It had stack overflow checking, array&#x2F;pointer bounds checking, pointer protection, HW checking of argument types during function calls (made possible by OS written in ALGOL w&#x2F; strong types), and tags to prevent execution of data. You can bet your ass that ALGOL and a machine designed for it was <i>much</i> more memory safe than C on a PDP-11. Or even C on a mainframe. Doing a pentest on that architecture with today&#x27;s knowledge gave me very few points of ingress due to all those checks implemented for the safe-by-default language.<p>&quot;it is also true that for a long time (and, arguably, still today), GC&#x27;ed languages where perceived to be inadequate for system programming.&quot;<p>That would be true. Thing is, that had nothing to do with the safe languages and approaches that didn&#x27;t use GC&#x27;s and predated C. Further, Modula-2 showed one could match C-like simplicity&#x2F;efficiency with better safety with about no effort. Taken further, Hansen developed a safe-by-design langauge (with 5 keywords lol) and OS called Edison on PDP-11. At that point, it was clear that Thompson and Ritchie&#x27;s preferences were only reason their PDP-11 language was that insecure and hard to analyze. :)<p>&quot;Rust is possibly the first non-GC&#x27;ed safe language that seems to have a chance to reach mainstream adoption.&quot;<p>This, plus claim about recent advances, I agree with. It has a lot of potential. It&#x27;s why I promote it and help people posting here with Rust projects. Also tried to help them with their docs.