"Memory safety is pretty easy to catch" - my experience over the last 18 months or so on a large C++ open source project says very much otherwise, almost every week a new NPE or core dump/access violation seems to leak into the codebase. These simply can't happen in many other languages and many now even have good support for non-optional references, ruling out entire classes of bugs that can suck up significant developer time to track down. And for long running systems memory leaks can also be a substantial cause of instability. If I were working on a safety critical system I'd actively push to avoid using C/C++ unless there really was no alternative. And yes modern OS kernels are pretty good evidence that it is possible to do but I'd suggest it requires exceptional programmers and some very rigorous processes to enforce.