I wasn't talking about web applications, and modern garbage collectors are not stop-the-world.

Not to mention ... stop-the-world garbage collectors have a good reason for doing what they do. They are defragmenting the memory. You get that for free, when in C++ you would have to deal with hell if your app is doing lots of allocations ... see the shit the Firefox devs had to go through to alleviate the problems of heap fragmentation, and its still a problem.

Can you give an example of stop-the-world garbage collection?

Why would you allocate a large chunk of memory, when you are using a garbage collected language?

There may be reasons to want to mix manual and automatic memory management. If you want to do that, there are language that support it. Like D.

Why should memory management related to managing other resources. Anyway, you might be interested in The Haskell Disciplined Disciple Compiler (http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/DDC) which lets you statically encode resource management rules. (And of course spots garbage collection for memory.)