That's a nice soundbite, but not really fair. Modern Smalltalk-style languages can be fast. Look at Javascript! And in Obj-C, you can drop down to plain C when

That's a nice soundbite, but not really fair. Modern Smalltalk-style languages can be fast. Look at Javascript! And in Obj-C, you can drop down to plain C when you need the speed. It's possible to get your types mixed up when using non-generic collections, and that will throw an exception at runtime. No different from Go or Python. In terms of memory safety, it's a step up from C if you use ARC, as all your object lifetimes are managed automatically. You can still get memory corruption if you're careless with arrays, but it's not really an issue with objects.