Because pointers are scary!

Um, not using a virtual machine doesn't mean using unmanaged code. Even Java can be compiled to native x86 machine code using GCJ.

Golang, for example, does not use a VM, but it is a managed language.

Good point. Do you happen to know of a list of managed native languages? All that really comes to mind is C# (the CLI really) and Go. Tried googling for a list of such languages but couldn't find any using terms "list of native managed languages" (without quotes).