I have been doing it for 20 years, and all the time Pascal had null-safe strings and C-like performance. And the strings even had mutability xor aliasing with copy on write
Imagine an alternative reality where Borland did not went greedy, Java 1.0 would just be like Go, while .NET Native would just be improved VB 7 and a new language C# (just a kind of "managed C++") making COM developer friendly without C++ boilerplate that persists to this day.