Hey I'm Special!
As in short bus special.
You can automate C++ memory use much of the time - if you're clever and have patience and only use smart pointers (which you can get to act *almost* but not quite like real pointers) and are disciplined about how you pass things around (stack memory passes as references, heap by pointer - always decide what kind of class you have when defining it - never have some objects of a class live on the stack and others on the heap).
I haven't mucked with it lately but there are a bazillion memory management gotchas in C++ (one of which has been fixed I think (delete vs delete[]) but more than C ever had), any of which can bite you in the ass if you so much as cast a single pointer.
I've also seen projects saved by purchasing a commercial GC lib. You could have GC in C++, but the culture is opposed to the "cost" of one. Mostly out of ignorance. If Java did anything at all for the world - it showed that GC can perform reasonably (not like most enlightened people didn't know that - but how many people are enlightened?).
