When GP said “most”, I interpreted it more broadly. Most applications simply do not require the guarantees of a non-GC language. When you expand that horizon, list of contenders becomes considerably larger - even when restricted to statically typed languages.
Yes for example many Python users switched to Go, a native code GC language, and are satisfied with the performance.
There’s also the middle ground of Swift’s memory management which uses compiler-elided refcounting - i.e. the compiler detects when a count goes up then down again and removes those operations.
> There’s also the middle ground of Swift’s memory management which uses compiler-elided refcounting - i.e. the compiler detects when a count goes up then down again and removes those operations.
In the face of threading that's not a safe optimisation; if another thread decrements the refcount inbetween those two removed operations, boom. The compiler will have to track every variable that crosses threads or something.
D maybe? D and Rust are the two languages which come to mind when I think about "possible C++ replacements".