The "safest" comment is mostly tongue-in-cheek, but the advantages are real. I enjoyed this comment from someone contributing to the project for the first time:

< barrbrain> atomnuker: I felt good when my patch was done and I had exactly what I set out to write.

< barrbrain> I didn't enjoy the compiler forcing me to fix all my bugs upfront.

There are also advantages other than safety to using a modern systems language that has learned something from the last 30 years of programming language design but doesn't come with all of the baggage of C++.