You're correct; Clay's type system doesn't help much with memory safety. It's flexible enough to express RAII-based ownership semantics like C++, so you can manage dynamic memory with reference counted, uniquely-owned, or other policy-enforcing pointer objects, but also like C++, the language doesn't prevent you from taking nonowning references to arbitrary data behind the type system's back and using those references after the owning object has freed the data.