In Java 8 the JVM knows how to compile AES straight through to AES-NI invocations, so the CPU itself is doing the hardware accelerated crypto (in constant time). It's not necessarily the case that higher level languages have to be unsafer: especially not on something like a server where the overhead of JIT compilers get amortized out.
Okay, but what about other crypto algorithms not implemented in hardware? Eventually someone has to figure out how to generate machine code that operates in constant time across code paths, and they need a language that will let them do that.
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In Java 8 the JVM knows how to compile AES straight through to AES-NI invocations, so the CPU itself is doing the hardware accelerated crypto (in constant time). It's not necessarily the case that higher level languages have to be unsafer: especially not on something like a server where the overhead of JIT compilers get amortized out.
Okay, but what about other crypto algorithms not implemented in hardware? Eventually someone has to figure out how to generate machine code that operates in constant time across code paths, and they need a language that will let them do that.