Originally Posted by
CornedBee
Standardized garbage collection (an optional feature for compilers) was planned for C++09, but has been taken out due to time constraints. The current working draft contains wording that describes when 3rd-party GCs have to work correctly, and when they're allowed to fail (mostly to do with masking pointers so that the GC collects an object before it's really given up).
By formulating these core requirements, they can later put actual garbage collection into a library TR.