&gt; The immediate costs being run-time performance or qualitative things like maintainability.<p>I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s true. There&#x27;s no reason why memory safety has to cost either performance or maintainability.<p>It <i>feels</i> like there&#x27;s some sort of fundamental dichotomy because we didn&#x27;t know how to do it in 1980, and we&#x27;re still using languages from 1980, but our knowledge has advanced since then.