You're assuming that the JVM is secure. But yes, good point. Although I'd argue that a truly strong type system should also catch problems with pointers. The c

You're assuming that the JVM is secure. But yes, good point. Although I'd argue that a truly strong type system should also catch problems with pointers. The compiler should try to prove that any pointer access/arithmetic can or cannot cause undefined behavior - if it could cause undefined behavior, emit a compiler error, if it cannot prove that it won't cause undefined behavior, emit a warning and insert a runtime check. (Still have the underlying "unsafe" functions. But group them into part of the standard library as an "unsafe" package.)