Question

Managed languages being the ones that handle memory cleanup for you.

EDIT I’m not talking about garbage collection. I was just interested in knowing about languages that would free() memory for me automatically, and still compile down to machine code.

Answer 1

You seem to be confusing “Managed” and “Garbage collection”, while often managed languages (for example C# and Java) have automated garbage collection, “managed” actually refers to the fact that there is a “virtual machine” which executes your code (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managed_code).

So for example the CLR (common language runtime) is the virtual machine executing .Net code, and the JVM (Java virtual machine) is the virtual machine executing java code.

You can in fact have Garbage collection for unmanaged languages (for example C++), and visa versa have managed languages without garbage collection (EDIT: I was looking for some but I can’t seem to find any unless Objective C counts, I’m not sure it makes a huge amount of sense to create a managed language without garbage collection anyway)

Both of Java and C# can in fact be compiled directly into machine code, so they are executed directly and not using a virtual machine – for .Net code this is done using NGEN (in fact the CLR compiles .Net assemblies into machine code as you execute it, so-called “Just in time” compilation)

EDIT: As an update to the update of your question, there are in fact a number of alternatives to garbage collection in a spectrum between the extreme of complete manual memory management and garbage collection, and a lot of languages which compile to machine code incorporate varying forms of memory management which dont require you to explicitly free memory.

Can I ask – is this an “out of interest” question, or are you trying to select a language for a project – If the latter then why are you so interested in having your langauge compile down to machine code? Certainly in the case of .Net having your code JIT compiled offers a number of performance advantages (in the majority of cases), also NGENing your code doesn’t remove the dependency on the .Net framework.