[jblow]

The graphics APIs we use are often just about managing raw buffers of memory -- often different areas of memory that have different performance characteristics (Onion Bus vs Garlic Bus, yo). You simply can't do that under constraints of memory safety.

But beyond that ... "smart pointers" and the like make your program slow, because they postulate that your data is a lot of small things allocated far away from each other on the heap. I spoke about this in more depth at my Barcelona talk earlier this year.