> So, with modern compiler technology, are languages that check array bounds necessarily slower than those that aren’t? If so, is the difference large enough?

> So, with modern compiler technology, are languages that check array bounds necessarily slower than those that aren’t? If so, is the difference large enough? For performance sensitive tasks - definitely! I certainly don't want array bound checking in my (soft)realtime audio processing code. As a side note: when I write an audio plugin, it's the responsibility of the host application to tell me the correct buffer sizes, so I basically deal with trusted input. It's still possible to mess up, of course, but personally I found writing DSP code to be pretty safe.