It's pretty obvious from the context that runtime/GC means having a runtime with a tracing GC - and the tradeoffs are well known. These discussions were played out over the last two decades - we all know GC can be fast, but there were and are plenty of use-cases where the tradeoffs are so bad that it's a non-starter.

Not to mention that writing a high quality GC is a monumental task - it took those decades for C# and Java to get decent - very few projects have the kind of backing to pull that off successfully.

In practical terms think about the complexity of enabling WASM that someone mentioned in this thread when you reuse C runtime and skip tracing GC.

I'm kind of venting in the thread to be fair, Walter Bright owes me nothing and it's his project, I had fun playing with it. I'm just sad we couldn't have gotten to Zig 20 years ago when we were that close :)