> That's a good point. But as a result it provides only a marginally better type system, at the cost of performance compared to C. Why not make it a lot better than C, with the same performance?

For many things, GC is a huge productivity boost. I've heard good things about C99, C will probably evolve into a language with a better type system anyway. I don't use C myself, but I don't see why there couldn't be a flag to ensure code only uses a saner subset of the type system.