>>3
Not so fast son. I've been taking a look at it too, I'll probably create another thread about this just to piss off the GC people too.
Essentially, what they've done is they took the syntax of C++/CLI, their managed .NET extensions for C++, and the back end semantics of say Objective-C++ with reference counting and combined it all together, calling it C++ for Windows Runtime (or WinRT for short).
So C++/CLI essentially compiles down to native machine language code, but automatically emits reference counting retain/release semantics on ref-counted objects (denoted using the ^ pointer syntax). They've completely gutted garbage collection from the core runtime.
The WinRT internals still run within a managed VM JIT interpreter, for interoping with C# and other .NET code, they've just removed the GC heap. .NET is now built ontop of this new VM, and extends it with a GC heap.
So much for GC, even incremental so called real-time GC, it's so bad that Microsoft had to get rid of it to remain competitive against Apple on embedded devices.
That aside, with WinRT, it looks like they've finally managed to come up with something that kills MFC/ATL for native applications development on the Windows platform, with performance characteristics that should rival Objective-C/C++ but with the same level of ease-of-development.
It's also a shame that they focused on C++ for WinRT instead of on adding C++11 features.