Is C garbage collected? There is no simple answer to that. Link with Boehm (or something similar) and it is. These things are often (with almost any language) aspects of the implementation & deployment, and most mature languages have multiple answers as well. Is Python "compiled"? Well, with Pypy or Cython or etc. it is. (Or maybe it's always at least "compiled" to byte codes run by a slow byte code interpreter.) Etc., etc. I think your standards for "simplicity" or univalence may be, as @SolitudeSF alluded to, unsatisfied by even prog.lang's you like (which you gave no concrete examples of).

> Is Nim garbage collected? There is no simple answer to that.

Yes, Nim v1 is a garbage collected language. It also shipped with custom destructors support https://nim-lang.github.io/Nim/destructors.html.

Nim v2, which is hopefully two releases away, will ship with a memory management scheme called "orc" https://nim-lang.org/blog/2020/12/08/introducing-orc.html

However right now, it is recommended that all new code is written with the `--gc:orc` switch.