With a purely linear type system, memory management could be handled statically, negating the need for traditional GC. The underlying behavior would be closer to C-style just-in-time {de-}allocation, or C++ RAII. LinearML is an attempt at this: https://github.com/pikatchu/LinearML
Regarding Linear Type Systems and friends I recommend reading parts of Jesse Tov's PhD thesis [1], "Practical Programming with Substructural Types". I found parts of it pretty accessible as an undergraduate. In particular he uses substructural types to put types on the network protocol of a server and client. Neat stuff.
There's also the wikipedia page on Substructural Types [2].
Don't know of any articles, but there are a number of papers on linear logic and linear type theory. Most are pretty dense, but the first few pages of Wadler's "Linear types can change the world!" give a very readable overview of the area. http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/linear/linear.ps
