A recent email thread on the cap-talk maling list (set up by Jonathan Shapiro, the author of the linked article) recently discussed Singularity as a capability system . Summary: it is a capability system but does not take advantage of the fact very well.

As others have pointed out, "managed" code refers to the use of automatically managed memory allocation rather than manual use of malloc/free. By combining that with type safety and array bounds checking, many classes of C/C++ bugs are eliminated or reduced. The penalty of course is that you need to run a garbage collector.