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Garbage collection takes over responsibility for memory deallocation. For more valuable resources such as windows handles and file handles, you need a more precise mechanism. C++ provides such a mechanism. And so does C++/CLI. But C# does not (there is no way to enforce that somebody calls Dispose() on your object implementing IDisposable).



Managed C++ has both. You can have garbage collected object (allocated with gcnew) that gets garbage collected, but you can also use RAII since you can have deterministic destructors that get called when the object goes out of scope.



You can't really call it functional because it has very little support for immutable data structures. Immutability is a prerequisite for referential transparency, and referential transparency is the core property of functional languages.



I don't want to do anything at runtime. I would just like to add static methods to existing types, since static methods are (unfortunately) very common in C#.

If you write the type name and a dot, you get the list of all public static methods of this type and its base types. I would like to add a method to this list.

An example would be adding a Parse<T>(string) method to System.Enum.

Whether adding methods to existing types/instances is a good idea is another topic. But if one is possible, then the other should be possible as well.

By the way: enums are another topic where C# is broken. Why is it not possible to use enums as type parameters? And why do enums not implement the IEquatable<T> interface?

I think static methods and fields are a stupid idea in the first place. That is why they don't exist in well-designed languages like scala.