Garbage collection was left to the application, the way it is on iOS before v5 (if I'm not mistaken), C, C++ and many other languages. While it does increase mental load on the developer (compared to gc languages e.g. Lisp, Java, C# or Python), it is not too hard. It's still the norm in C++, for example.
And like node.js, they tried to avoid blocking APIs (and mostly succeeded), but provided a very simple way to "outsource" them to other threads. You can do that in C or Java as well, but it's not as easy or as pervasive as it is in BeOS.
And like node.js, they tried to avoid blocking APIs (and mostly succeeded), but provided a very simple way to "outsource" them to other threads. You can do that in C or Java as well, but it's not as easy or as pervasive as it is in BeOS.