Indeed. The existence of Rust as a safe language without a GC shows that a system that can only run safe code can be as efficient as systems that expose raw hardware.
In 90s and 00s they did this with languages similar to Java because low level safe languages weren’t yet invented. If this idea ever resurfaces it will be done with languages similar to rust and will be competitive with and likely more efficient than unsafe systems. This will potentially be a nice convergence with power-efficient RISCV chips that don’t include an MMU or a supervisor mode.
In 90s and 00s they did this with languages similar to Java because low level safe languages weren’t yet invented. If this idea ever resurfaces it will be done with languages similar to rust and will be competitive with and likely more efficient than unsafe systems. This will potentially be a nice convergence with power-efficient RISCV chips that don’t include an MMU or a supervisor mode.