But if you don't have the bounds checks in machine code, then you don't have bounds checks. I suppose SQLite might use a C linter tool that can prove the bound

But if you don't have the bounds checks in machine code, then you don't have bounds checks. I suppose SQLite might use a C linter tool that can prove the bounds checks happen at a higher layer, and then elide redundant ones in lower layers, but... C compilers won't do that by default, they'll just write memory-unsafe machine code. Right?