No sum types (the Java alternative to Rust enums is the horribly verbose visitor pattern, so a lot of the time people don't bother). null. A verbose and unabstractable "checked exception" system (that the standard library uses poorly in places) that leaves many users resorting to unchecked exceptions (panics) instead. Uninitialized field problems because methods are virtual even when called from superclass constructors. Excessive overhead to custom types that leads to using weakly typed Strings etc. rather than domain types. Poor abstraction facilities that lead to a culture of "magic" annotations and runtime reflection (or worse, proxies and bytecode manipulation) e.g. @Transactional, @Inject.

Java is safer than C, but it's a long way behind a modern functional language like Rust.

Well, I don't know about java's reputation, but there's this:

http://www.cvedetails.com/product/19117/Oracle-JRE.html?vend...

http://www.cvedetails.com/product/1526/SUN-JRE.html?vendor_i...

Security exploits say nothing about the language's memory safety design. Java still qualifies as a safe language.

As a safe language from race conditions or memory leaks?

The Java VM is written in C though.

There are many java vms

The most popular(hotspot/openjdk) is written in c++/assembly

GC is not about safety at all, sorry. I'm not going to start flamewar, but just to answer your question: https://www.google.com/#newwindow=1&q=null+pointer+exception

You can't say NPEs are an example that Java is unsafe. The propegation is Nulls isn't Java's fault and Java's evolving currently to make use of Optionals as we speak to attempt to avoid this.

I can say it.