Your objects contain/use various resources, such as memory, file descriptors, mutexes, etc. The way to reclaim any of these is to destroy the object, which lets you reclaim all of them. So memory management is very much tied to other resource management, since they both involve the same thing (deciding when to destroy objects you no longer need). Unfortunately not all resources can be collected equally lazily, so memory-centric GC schemes that ignore the requirements of other resources tend to get in the way (and make you do using(){...} or try/finally to make sure your files are closed, instead of allowing for RAII).