I hope that never happens, because I think such a world would be extremely dystopian. Strong safety guarantees sound very beneficial at first ("safe" anything in general tends to evoke that response), but as shocking as it may seem, a lot of the freedom we have today is a result of using "unsafe" languages like C: iOS jailbreaks, Android rooting, homebrew on game consoles, and many other examples of freeing one's devices from restrictions imposed by the original manufacturer and giving control back to the user depend on this. These bugs and vulnerabilities, although they can be exploited maliciously, are in some ways like an escape hatch from the tyranny of corporate control. If strongly safe languages become the norm, all these would disappear and our computing experience become even more locked-down and restricted. The thought of them being used for DRM is scary (I remember reading an academic paper that suggeted this as one of their applications, and that's one of the thing that provoked me into really starting to think about this.) Even open-source software where safer languages appear most beneficial can be used against the user.
Ultimately is a security vs. freedom tradeoff, and I think we've sacrificed too much of the latter already.
Ultimately is a security vs. freedom tradeoff, and I think we've sacrificed too much of the latter already.