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Why is Objective-C so unsafe? From what little I know about it, I see no reason why it should be less safe than, say, Smalltalk.

If Objective-C is the second-least safe language, what is the least safe language?

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Smalltalk is garbage-collected. ObjC deals in raw memory addresses. It's actually less secure than C, as I see it.

This doesn't affect your point, since ObjC does still deal in raw memory addresses, but it has supported garbage-collection since Objective-C 2.0 (i.e since Leopard/10.5)

Yeah, I need a better term for high-level-language than "garbage collected" (I do some Cocoa dev in my spare time, and I do like being able to ignore reference counting. Oh! Reference counting! Another security weakness with Cocoa.)

Not sure how you reach the less secure than C conclusion, unless your claim is that the Cocoa frameworks specifically have a lot of security holes.

Not so much Cocoa's code quality as the worst-of-both-worlds situation it's in with exposure to crappy C code and a very dynamic runtime that is basically impossible to lock down ASLR and W^X-style.

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