[pandaman]

>If performance was valued above all else in a narrow sense, OpenGL would not be used and people would program GPUs natively.

People do program GPU natively on game consoles. However, with so many GPUs in use (at least three major manufacturers each with multiple architectures just for desktop) it's impractical to write native graphics code. It's exactly the same concern as people have for CPU programming - it would be the best to write ISA code but given the variety of available CPUs the C/C++ is the best compromise between performance and usability. All attempts to push "better" language with forced run-time costs have failed to displace it.

>Bounds checking is very cheap on CPUs, but even more so on GPUs because GPUs are more rarely bottlenecked on simple local arithmetic.

Good news. GPUs do bounds checking in hardware already. The errors people want OpenGL to find are not about out-of-bounds but mostly of "I want to draw this but instead it's drawing that, what to do?" kind, caused by the complex state and its dynamic nature.