Indeed. It's certainly possible to make a language with safety checks that could be turned off in the final version which then has the same performance, but ha

Indeed. It's certainly possible to make a language with safety checks that could be turned off in the final version which then has the same performance, but has built in help during development, as well as less cryptic notation. As stated elsewhere, Pascal/Modula (for example) has some very nice features and is written at about the same level. As for small devices in this day and age, it's not like we can't use cross compilers hosted on desktop computers, since that what phone/tablet systems already do.