You are not forced to use C or C++. Rust has automatic memory management via its Ownership System. Once you get used to it, it feels a lot like a garbage collected language.
Maybe https://nim-lang.org would make sense for you? It's GC'd but compiles to C. I've been meaning to try it out and try compiling to WASM when I get a chance.
This brings up a question I've been meaning to ask when the topic came up, because I know almost nothing about GC. How does nim (a GC'd language) compile to a non-GC'd language? And since this is a thing that's possible (unless I'm misunderstanding, which is likely), why does WASM need to add support for GC (http://webassembly.org/docs/gc/#native-gc)?
