Isn't a good programming language design supposed to maintain a "foo-table" that takes care of this situation ?
Is it? why? A good programming language is one that lets you solve problems, no more, no less.
A garbage collector certainly lowers the barrier of entry, but it also takes control away from the programmer, which might be a problem in some cases. True, on a modern 2.5GHz quad-core computer, and with today's advanced and efficient garbage collectors, we can live with that. But C++ had to work with much more limited hardware, ranging from desktop computers with a whopping 16MB of RAM down to embedded platforms with 16KB, and everything in between. It has to be usable in realtime code, where you can not just pause the program for 0.5 seconds to run a garbage collection.
C++ isn't just designed to be the language used on desktop computers. It's meant to be usable everywhere, on memory-limited systems, in hard realtime scenarios, on large supercomputers and everywhere else.
C++'s guiding principle is "you don't pay for what you don't use". If you don't want a garbage collector, you shouldn't have to pay the (steep) price of one.
There are very powerful techniques to manage memory in C++ and avoid memory leaks, even without a garbage collector. If a garbage collector was the only way to avoid memory leaks, then there'd be a strong argument in favor of adding one to the language. But it isn't. You just have to learn how to properly manage memory yourself in C++.
