I'm willing to admit that GC is shit

/prog/, I've been giving some thought to the whole "GC is shit" thing and I want to try a different view. You see, I've been using only languages with automatic memory management lately, and they are inherently limiting. So my question is: what's the fastest way to learn the techniques of writing memory-safe programs in languages without GC?

There must be a set of rules, and it's okay if those rules are quite complex and take practice to master, but there must be a set of rules that, once learned, lets you write programs that are just as safe as in the auto-land but much more efficient. How can I learn those rules?

>>2
But what about shit like

blabla(...) {
x = new Foo()
...
return &x.justAField;
// x is freed but we've returned a pointer to one of its fields
}