The language is elegant, lets you perform tweaks down to an individual level and works across many platforms and can be used in any font.

It's totally possible to create a safe virtual machine for specific uses. There have been many attack vectors for fonts over the years due to the complexity in parsing them. I do not recall any of them being due to the hinting language.

The Mac one is hard coded for a single OS and font combination and a specific size down in the operating system.

I disagree that the later is less of a hack.