Memory safety and performance are not a contradiction, they are widely independant. Yes, some strategies like GC induce an overhead. But in the age of multiprocessor machines, this overhead gets very much reduced by parallel collection. And practice has shown, in programs with a lot of dynamic memory allocation, garbage collected languages often perform even better. There are different approaches, like memory safety by the compiler as Rust does it. And with "performance" in mind, you shouldn't forget, that most large C/C++ programs tend to use libraries to provide some amount of safety, but those libraries are of course adding some overhead too. Finally, the less time you spend on questions of memory management, the more time you have to write an actually fast program.