[Panzerschrek]

Rust have shown that safety can be achieved without sacrificing performance and many other aspects of language design. My language Ü proved this to be true too. So, I now see no reason not to incorporate safety mechanisms into newly-designed programming languages. For me adding no safety mechanisms is like not including safety belts and airbags in a newly-built car. That's why ask the same question again and again under each Show HN post presenting a new language.

> I feel like I sit along a different axis in the safe versus unsafe discourse

I can't believe someone can be neutral in this question. If you do actually write code in unsafe-languages, you are eventually forced to find a fix memory-related bugs and other bugs caused by their unsafety. Maybe you just don't need writing such low-level code and use some high-level language without direct memory access instead?

> what choices where made and why

In many cases there is no answer. My experience shows that many design decisions are made without thinking too long. One often just needs something to work right now rather than spending much time carefully designing each language feature. It's especially true for pretty-young language projects like Mach.