You can have manual control over memory if you want, though. This worked the last time I looked at the language, at least:

    foo = cast[ptr Foo](alloc(sizeof(Foo)))
    # do stuff with foo
    dealloc(foo)

EDIT: Here's the documentation on the site itself. Most things are 'traced' by the GC, but by using alloc and dealloc you can work with 'untraced' (i.e. manually allocated) memory: http://nim-lang.org/0.11.0/manual.html#types-reference-and-p...