[ladarlevison]

I disagree. The more layers of abstraction you have, the more places there are for a backdoor to hide. Also, unless you're using OpenJDK, Java means downloading a binary blob which could be hiding any number of surprises, intentional, or accidental.

With magma I've taken the approach of trying to limit my dependencies to the kernel, and libc. Anything else I use is bundled and thus gets tested extensively for leaks, overflows, etc. That doesn't mean bugs don't exist, but it does mean if they exist, then the source is there for you to inspect and fix.