Over 70% of the severe bugs identified last year in Chrome were memory safety issues, namely “mistakes with pointers in the C or C++ languages,” and Google decided to tackle the problem before it becomes even more serious.

Of the potential solutions, the Internet search giant decided to focus on two, namely introducing runtime checks to ensure that pointers are correct, and seeking a different memory safe programming language.

“Runtime checks have a performance cost. Checking the correctness of a pointer is an infinitesimal cost in memory and CPU time. But with millions of pointers, it adds up,” Google notes.