> bounds checking in hardware.

What. That's a horrible idea. Not only would that require your hardware to understand abstractions several layers above what it actually operates on, it would also mean it'd have to check bounds of - for example - an array on every instruction accessing it. That is something compilers can do at more strategic places.

Please keep that complexity out of my CPUs, they're buggy enough already. At least with software we can fix issues later, which isn't a given with hardware.