Interpreted languages and garbage collection.

Bounds checking barely registers as a factor.

You can write Java that uses arrays that are allocated once - will it have loops as fast as C? Why not?

And furthermore I don’t suspect you’re proposing we should be using C + bounds checking (that’s already a Gcc flag?). But rather bounds checking is one of many safety features.

The whole pitch of Java is exactly what OP said - let’s just pay 10-30% cost to get these nice portability and memory benefits over C++, and it didn’t work that way especially as memory speeds have diverged from CPU.