[raymondh]

This is a red-herring. In the end, everything is run in machine language which is intrinsically unsafe. But that doesn't matter. High level languages can enforce constraints that eliminate or mitigate common programmer errors for memory access.

For example, it is a simple matter for a language to provide a list or array API that will perform bounds checking for indexed access. This simple measure would have prevented something like the HeartBleed security bug.